Bookworm Room

On August 10, 1993, as one of the requirements for becoming a United States Supreme Court justice, Ruth Bader Ginsburg placed her hand on the Bible and spoke the following words: I, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, [...]

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As a dues paying California lawyer, I periodically receive an email from the California State Bar offering random tidbits and squiblets of news some assumes California lawyers might find interesting.  The January edition intrigued me because of drive-by punditry that appeared in an ethics analysis of Judge Richard Posner’s latest decision.  I wasn’t paying attention, [...]

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Do you have any spare change lying around?  Yes?  I thought you might. My dollar coins say “In God We Trust.” My dollar bills say “In God We Trust.” My quarters say “In God We Trust.” My dimes say “In God We Trust.” My nickels say “In God We Trust.” My pennies say “In God [...]

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I haven’t been blogging about far Left judicial activist Goodwin Liu, but if you’ve been following the story on your own, you’ll be happy to know that the Senate Republicans successfully filibustered his nomination — a reminder, as if we need one, that the filibuster is an important tool for allowing the minority in Congress [...]

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People who know me in person also know that nothing is more likely to send my blood pressure spiking than talk about judges.  (To any of my readers who are in fact judges, I’m sure you’re the exception to anything nasty I might be about to say about judges.)  I dislike judges, something that is [...]

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Just random stuff that’s so good you shouldn’t miss it: Shirley Sherrod’s been on a roller coaster.  Thanks to a video snippet that Andrew Breitbart posted, she got pilloried as the face of Leftist/NAACP racial intolerance.  When it turned out the snippet was out of context, she got sanctified as the face of true racial [...]

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Kim Priestap, who blogs at Up North Mommy, got an impassioned email from the Democratic Party, raving about Elena Kagan.  Does it rave about her brains?  No (although it mentions as an aside that she’s “among the best legal minds this country has to offer,” which is a depressing comment about legal minds in America).  [...]

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You’ve probably noticed that I’ve had nothing to say about Kagan.  There is nothing to say.  She’s a bright, often charming, lady from the far Left who, entirely separate from her anti-Constitutional ideology, is grossly unqualified in terms of professional experience and intellectual heft to be a Supreme Court justice.  She is, in other words, [...]

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The American Prospect has written a little guide for its readers explaining why Republican attacks will fall off Kagan like eggs off Teflon.  You and I know that they won’t matter because of the Democratic majority, and maybe the American Prospect knows that too, because its defense is lazy.  One aspect of the defense, however, [...]

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h/t:  Mike Devx

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Gentleman of the old school might confirm Kagan.  Americans who believe in the Constitution and its freedoms must not: Those [traditional Senate] rules [for confirming Supreme Court Justices] might be summarized as follows: (1) The president is entitled to an appointee who generally shares his views (i.e., a liberal president is entitled to a liberal [...]

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A few things have crossed my radar this morning that I hope you’ll find as interesting as I did: Is Michelle Obama depressed?  One of my friends thinks she is.  That is, she thinks Michelle has moved beyond anger and arrogance and landed in sheer misery.  She sent this link along as an example of [...]

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I read E.J. Dionne’s fatuous defense of Kagan in The New Republic, and started formulating a response to his superficial argument comparing Kagan to Roberts.  (It was so superficial it almost, but not quite, devolved into “and they’re both homo sapiens.”)  Fortunately, I was spared that effort when I read both Paul Mirengoff’s and Ed [...]

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J.C. Arenas on the laundry list of qualifications for Obama’s Supreme Court picks: Obama’s first Supreme Court appointment was Sonia Sotomayor, the Bronx-bred daughter of Puerto Rican parents, who supposedly was a valedictorian student with a deficiency in English and become an Ivy-League educated jurist credited with saving Major League Baseball. Now we have Elena [...]

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I know that much is being said amongst both Progressives and Conservatives about Kagan’s possible lesbianism.  Progressives are mad at her for being in the closet; Conservatives are worried about her orientation affecting her rulings as a Supreme Court judge.  Both are completely wrong. Regarding the Progressive’s disdain for Kagan’s decision to keep her private [...]

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I’d like to analyze a Harvard’s law prof’s defense of a Harvard law dean.  The Prof (and ex-dean himself) is Robert Clark, who wrote an op-ed in the WSJ defending Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s approach to the military during her tenure as dean of Harvard Law.  He spells out the facts, which I’ll accept [...]

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To no one’s surprise, Obama nominated Elena Kagan to fill the opening on the Supreme Court.  Many have pointed to the fact that she’s never served as a judge before as one of the main reasons Obama did so — she has no paper trail.  Since I have a generally low estimation of judges at [...]

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If there was ever an example of misguided compassion, this story out of Britain must rank at the top of the list: A psychopathic Satanist, given a ‘life means life’ sentence for strangling his cellmate whilst already serving life for murder, has had that cut to 20 years on appeal in order ‘to give him [...]

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Sadie sent me a great trio of stories today, and I want to pass them on to you: The UN wants to make sure that the Western nation’s efforts to protect themselves against cross-dressing jihadists (you know, those guys who don burqas to hide bombs) don’t offend transgendered individuals (who may or may not be [...]

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I gave the post the above title because, in England, even a woman who is a convicted sexual predator gets to keep up her relationship with the victim: A public school music teacher was today jailed for lesbian sex with a 15-year-old pupil – but was given an astonishing green light to continue the ‘affair’ [...]

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Whether you are for or against gay marriage, Robert George issues a sound warning about the dangers that flow from letting the Supreme Court get its hands on the issue: It would be disastrous for the justices to do so [rule against California's Prop. 8 and, by extension, make gay marriage the law of the [...]

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It was a foregone conclusion, but it’s still irksome that the RINOs piled on for Sotomayor.  It’s not just that she’s a judicial activist who dislikes self-defense, lies about her record, and shilled for a radical Puerto Rican group.  It’s that the hearings showed something very, very specific about her:  she’s a complete mediocrity.  The [...]

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This clip of today’s Sotomayor hearings may just have hit upon the most important constitutional question that faces us all as we confront our devolution into the Obamatopian State. In this segment, Senator Tom Coburn (R., OK) asks Judge Sotomayor whether she agrees that Americans have a basic right to self defense. The ensuing silence [...]

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You know that I don’t like judges.  I’ve certainly made no secret of that fact, and it’s no doubt a by-product of practicing law in a region crawling with activist judges.  Listening to Sotomayor struggle to articulate things — and to avoid her own footprint — in response to Sen. Lindsay Graham’s questioning is painful.  [...]

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The Washington Post is warning Republican senators not to be mean to poor Judge Sotomayor.  It’s a funny (inadvertently funny) article, because the Post editors acknowledge that Obama was anything but gracious when he was a Senator; then they explain why, even though he wasn’t gracious, he was right; and then they urge Republicans to [...]

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