More on what that Supreme Court case was all about. Sometimes I think Thomas is living in a different dimension, but as I've pointed out in the Feed in the past, underestimate him at your own risk.
[It has been said that] Justice Thomas' declaration that finding Section 5 "no longer constitutionally justified" should be seen not as a "sign of defeat" but rather an "acknowledgment of victory." Superficially, that's very catchy. There are only two problems with it—the facts and the law. On the facts, there is plenty of evidence that American society has not yet entered a post-racial political nirvana. On the law, the point that's completely obfuscated in today's opinions is that the Supreme Court is not writing on a blank slate. More...
Showing posts with label Judicial Activism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Judicial Activism. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
FEED: Voting rights
It would appear as if SCOTUS is poised to remove any sort of special treatment based on race from the books. Chief Justice Roberts has certainly made his position clear in the past, that the time has come. The interesting thing here is that, I would imagine, the world would be a better place if it were color-blind. And maybe we're moving toward a color-blind US. But are we there yet? Has the time come?
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, acknowledged that the court’s approach stretched the statutory text, but he said the court should avoid deciding hard constitutional questions when it could. “We are now a very different nation” than the one that first passed the Voting Rights Act, he said. “Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.”More...
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, acknowledged that the court’s approach stretched the statutory text, but he said the court should avoid deciding hard constitutional questions when it could. “We are now a very different nation” than the one that first passed the Voting Rights Act, he said. “Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.”More...
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Breaking news!!!
We here at Coachean HQ have gotten early word on the upcoming Big Jake tournament. To celebrate the impending appointment of former high school debater Sonia Sotomayor (AKA Cardinal Spellman SS) to the Supreme Court, Forensics Directory Jon Cruz has invited the entire court to the tournament to adjudicate rounds, with the following results.
Justice John Paul Stevens has declined the invitation. “I’m too old for that sort of nonsense,” he was quoted as saying. “Hell, he’s too old for pretty much everything,” Director Cruz was reputedly heard to comment.
Justice Stephen Breyer has tentatively accepted the invitation, provided that he is allowed to intervene in the rounds that he adjudicates. “We activist judges need to keep our hand in,” he explained.
Justice Anthony Kennedy remains undecided. His aides have reported that he wouldn’t mind coming, provided that he doesn’t have to offer a paradigm and that he can sit only on multiple-judge panels, so that no matter which way he decides, he is part of the majority.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts will attend. He has, however, insisted that he only be expected to vote for the side representing bare-fisted capitalists, and that no one run Foucault in his presence.
Justice Samuel Alito will do whatever Roberts tells him.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will attend. “Do they still have Jews at Bronx Science?” she asked.
Justice Clarence Thomas could not be reached for comment. Ever.
Justice Antonin Scalia said he wouldn’t miss it for the world. “As long as topicality is the only voting issue that matters,” he claimed, “I’m in. Harms? Solvency? Inherency? Who needs ‘em?”
Tournament Director Cruz is thrilled to have gotten such a response, although he has expressed disappointment that soon-to-be-former Justice Souter has refused his offer to run Congress tab. “You’d think a mook like Souter would kill to run Congress, just once,” Cruz said. In his traditional fashion, Cruz will be assigning the celebrity judges personally during the tournament. “If we let Menick do it, Scalia would be in every round just to punish him. Every time Nino’d get halfway to the free bagels, the next round would be out and he would be on again. And God knows what outrage Menick would level at Justice Thomas.” Cruz is well-known for his vigorous defense of Justices Thomas and Scalia in forensics circles. “Sure,” he says, “they don’t exactly represent my personal point of view, but at least you never have to wonder how they’re going to vote on an issue. I don’t even see why they bother coming in every day, for that matter. They could just call me up and ask me what position makes my blood boil the most, and there they are, every time.”
It is rumored that, for the 2010 contest, Cruz will be enlisting the services of President Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI, Hillary Clinton, Leonard Nimoy, Kim Jong-il, Lady GaGa, Tiger Woods and Ashton Kutcher. This blog will report all updates as they happen.
Justice John Paul Stevens has declined the invitation. “I’m too old for that sort of nonsense,” he was quoted as saying. “Hell, he’s too old for pretty much everything,” Director Cruz was reputedly heard to comment.
Justice Stephen Breyer has tentatively accepted the invitation, provided that he is allowed to intervene in the rounds that he adjudicates. “We activist judges need to keep our hand in,” he explained.
Justice Anthony Kennedy remains undecided. His aides have reported that he wouldn’t mind coming, provided that he doesn’t have to offer a paradigm and that he can sit only on multiple-judge panels, so that no matter which way he decides, he is part of the majority.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts will attend. He has, however, insisted that he only be expected to vote for the side representing bare-fisted capitalists, and that no one run Foucault in his presence.
Justice Samuel Alito will do whatever Roberts tells him.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will attend. “Do they still have Jews at Bronx Science?” she asked.
Justice Clarence Thomas could not be reached for comment. Ever.
Justice Antonin Scalia said he wouldn’t miss it for the world. “As long as topicality is the only voting issue that matters,” he claimed, “I’m in. Harms? Solvency? Inherency? Who needs ‘em?”
Tournament Director Cruz is thrilled to have gotten such a response, although he has expressed disappointment that soon-to-be-former Justice Souter has refused his offer to run Congress tab. “You’d think a mook like Souter would kill to run Congress, just once,” Cruz said. In his traditional fashion, Cruz will be assigning the celebrity judges personally during the tournament. “If we let Menick do it, Scalia would be in every round just to punish him. Every time Nino’d get halfway to the free bagels, the next round would be out and he would be on again. And God knows what outrage Menick would level at Justice Thomas.” Cruz is well-known for his vigorous defense of Justices Thomas and Scalia in forensics circles. “Sure,” he says, “they don’t exactly represent my personal point of view, but at least you never have to wonder how they’re going to vote on an issue. I don’t even see why they bother coming in every day, for that matter. They could just call me up and ask me what position makes my blood boil the most, and there they are, every time.”
It is rumored that, for the 2010 contest, Cruz will be enlisting the services of President Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI, Hillary Clinton, Leonard Nimoy, Kim Jong-il, Lady GaGa, Tiger Woods and Ashton Kutcher. This blog will report all updates as they happen.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
A woman without a bicycle; we are not adventurers anymore
We’ve all got our little peccadilloes:
WTF has pointed out that we can start to think now about voting for the LD rezzes for next season. They’re due early September to Rippin’. This is a tough one, first because I like most of the topics, and second, because this matrix business makes your head hurt, especially since you know it’s sort of meaningless. If your third pick for the fourth slot is the same as Bietz’s second pick for the first slot, does this mean that we’ll end up with O’C’s second pick for the second slot? I know that what it boils down to is that Rippin’ loves preferential balloting, and, let’s face it, who doesn’t? It’s always the top job everyone fights over behind the scenes at Districts congress, because it’s a little like Sudoku but without the dice. (Okay, I stole that joke. Famous soccer jokes: soccer is like chess but without the dice. Or, the score was one to one but it easily could have gone the other way.) Anyhow, I will consult the Sailors for their expert advice, and then I’ll proceed accordingly. Last year most of my top choices ended up on the boards, so I can’t really complain too much.
On a non-forensics note, I am a little sad that Pleasure Island, and more specifically the Adventurers Club, is going the way of Horizons. PI isn’t much now, aside from AC, but in the day it was a separate admission with some great shops, daily fireworks, a fun sense of a relatively kid-free party and, of course, a place to pledge “Kungaloosh!” Downtown Disney is moving toward, I gather, mostly themed restaurants plus shops, and while I certainly don’t mind either, they’re not quite the same thing as an actual Disney Imagineered attraction. Oh well, stuff comes and stuff goes. The economy being what it is, I don’t expect much to happen over the short term with the Mouse, but sooner or later they will feel the hot breath of Universal’s Harry Potter on their necks and get around to a little E-ticket blockbusting. We’ll see. I still have my WDW widget: 1409 days until my next trip. I am not holding my breath.
Oh yeah. One last little peccadillo:
Yeah, yeah. Someday I've got to learn Photoshop.
WTF has pointed out that we can start to think now about voting for the LD rezzes for next season. They’re due early September to Rippin’. This is a tough one, first because I like most of the topics, and second, because this matrix business makes your head hurt, especially since you know it’s sort of meaningless. If your third pick for the fourth slot is the same as Bietz’s second pick for the first slot, does this mean that we’ll end up with O’C’s second pick for the second slot? I know that what it boils down to is that Rippin’ loves preferential balloting, and, let’s face it, who doesn’t? It’s always the top job everyone fights over behind the scenes at Districts congress, because it’s a little like Sudoku but without the dice. (Okay, I stole that joke. Famous soccer jokes: soccer is like chess but without the dice. Or, the score was one to one but it easily could have gone the other way.) Anyhow, I will consult the Sailors for their expert advice, and then I’ll proceed accordingly. Last year most of my top choices ended up on the boards, so I can’t really complain too much.
On a non-forensics note, I am a little sad that Pleasure Island, and more specifically the Adventurers Club, is going the way of Horizons. PI isn’t much now, aside from AC, but in the day it was a separate admission with some great shops, daily fireworks, a fun sense of a relatively kid-free party and, of course, a place to pledge “Kungaloosh!” Downtown Disney is moving toward, I gather, mostly themed restaurants plus shops, and while I certainly don’t mind either, they’re not quite the same thing as an actual Disney Imagineered attraction. Oh well, stuff comes and stuff goes. The economy being what it is, I don’t expect much to happen over the short term with the Mouse, but sooner or later they will feel the hot breath of Universal’s Harry Potter on their necks and get around to a little E-ticket blockbusting. We’ll see. I still have my WDW widget: 1409 days until my next trip. I am not holding my breath.
Oh yeah. One last little peccadillo:
Yeah, yeah. Someday I've got to learn Photoshop.
Friday, June 27, 2008
SCOTUS shoots the moon
Heller certainly gives us something important to think about. There’s some good pieces abroad; keep an eye on the Feed for some of the best. I’m not quite sure how I feel about this in a legal sense; I need to study it in depth. But I must say that I do not favor the idea of there being a fundamental right to private weaponry in the year 2008. It just doesn’t track, much as, for me, the right of society to perform acts of capital punishment just doesn’t track. I do not feel that the Constitution is absolute; it has often proven itself inadequate to a particular situation, and fortunately an amendment process exists for fixing those inadequacies. I mean, after all, the thing did once explicitly support enslavement of human beings, and there was that ping pong game over the use of alcohol; some locales, by the way, are still dry, although none still have slavery, for the most part. Questions of law as morality, or morality as law, become very interesting in this light. Anyhow, people will be barking up this tree for some time to come, as they have for some time past. Students of the game should, if nothing else, learn a lot from it regardless of their personal opinion. And, let’s face it. It’s not as if we didn’t know it was coming.
On the positive side, the next time O’C has a forty-day awards ceremony, I can just shoot him. Scalia will defend my right to this. (Come to think of it, who wouldn’t?)
On the positive side, the next time O’C has a forty-day awards ceremony, I can just shoot him. Scalia will defend my right to this. (Come to think of it, who wouldn’t?)
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Nothing in life is forever. Except Twinkies.
As a special thank-you to Mike Bietz (he knows why), a bracketology especially for debate coaches. Anyone heading to Kentucky this week ought to appreciate it.
In these last few dwindling days of debateness, we seem to be up to the old eyeballs in topics. Last night we chezzed it up on judicial activism, and I was finally reminded what the problem was back last time we debated this, which had been eluding me, which was that a sizeable portion of the community was arguing for or against judicial review, and not judicial activism. I mean, at least they got the adjective right, but buying tickets for the policeman’s ball is not the same as buying tickets for the policeman’s wife. I’m not sure how things like this happen. Certainly there aren’t coaches out there who don’t know the difference between JA and JR. It’s hard enough to come up with a neutral definition of JA as it is, much less finding a neutral definition of JA for people don’t know what JR is. What is a debate judge to do in that situation, when both sides are so off the mark that you want to throw a couple of desks at them, their coach, their principal and their school board en masse? For that matter, all it takes is an affirmative to totally misdefine a concept for a round to go off the tracks. Ah, the joys of debate. Anyhow, we kicked old JA around for a while last night, and if nothing else established some ground of what law is all about, and majority will and minority rights and the like, but the lack of an objective standard for JA in the real world, as well as in the debate world, is a problem. Given that JA, as we’ve said before, is a pejorative term, dissociated from any particular left or right leaning of its practitioners, it’s hard to defend. In a way, you have to offer another, neutral term as your definition, and then run with the neutral term, sort of the opposite of calling estate taxes a death tax or late-termination procedures partial-birth abortions. If you make something sound undesirable, it will be hard to defend, and if you make something sound neutral, it will be easier to defend, and if you make something sound good, it will be easiest to defend. Needless to say, on the anniversary of Mission Accomplished, the power of words is moot, which is why the subject is so much fun. Still, for debate purposes, clear language that is fair to both sides ought to be the norm, but that would only be true if it weren’t competitive, which means that many debaters will grab any advantage they can, including something as simple as linguistic distaste. If JA has a bad odor, make your opponent defend it. Since the opponent can’t overcome that bad odor, the opponent needs to defuse it immediately and make the round not about something else, but about the underlying—odorless—concept. Good luck with that one.
Termite was among the confabbers last night, and got to formally express his dismay that he won’t be debating the NatNats topic. Or at least I think he formally expressed his dismay: last night he was speaking entirely in Polish, so for all I know he was listing the ingredients on a Twinkie package. Still, I agree with him. As we know, the best topics are always the NatNats topics, exclusive to the annual finalists. In my old Modest Novice days, it would not be inconceivable to simply take any NatNat topic and carry it over for next season’s novices, since it will be, almost by definition, paradigmatic. It will be interesting to see how the new resolution-choosing rules affect the outcomes next year. I remember them as being fairly confusing. Time will tell.
And I’m off to WDW in little over a week. Today’s trivia: Epcot’s Japan attraction was going to have a roller coaster, and Fuji film offered to finance it, but since Kodak was a major Disney sponsor, that was not going to happen. Which is why Figment, the character from the Kodak pavilion, is purple. If he were green, like a normal dragon, he’d be the corporate Fuji color. And I always thought he was purple because he was imaginary… Welcome to the real world. Or the real Disney World (if such a concept is possible).
In these last few dwindling days of debateness, we seem to be up to the old eyeballs in topics. Last night we chezzed it up on judicial activism, and I was finally reminded what the problem was back last time we debated this, which had been eluding me, which was that a sizeable portion of the community was arguing for or against judicial review, and not judicial activism. I mean, at least they got the adjective right, but buying tickets for the policeman’s ball is not the same as buying tickets for the policeman’s wife. I’m not sure how things like this happen. Certainly there aren’t coaches out there who don’t know the difference between JA and JR. It’s hard enough to come up with a neutral definition of JA as it is, much less finding a neutral definition of JA for people don’t know what JR is. What is a debate judge to do in that situation, when both sides are so off the mark that you want to throw a couple of desks at them, their coach, their principal and their school board en masse? For that matter, all it takes is an affirmative to totally misdefine a concept for a round to go off the tracks. Ah, the joys of debate. Anyhow, we kicked old JA around for a while last night, and if nothing else established some ground of what law is all about, and majority will and minority rights and the like, but the lack of an objective standard for JA in the real world, as well as in the debate world, is a problem. Given that JA, as we’ve said before, is a pejorative term, dissociated from any particular left or right leaning of its practitioners, it’s hard to defend. In a way, you have to offer another, neutral term as your definition, and then run with the neutral term, sort of the opposite of calling estate taxes a death tax or late-termination procedures partial-birth abortions. If you make something sound undesirable, it will be hard to defend, and if you make something sound neutral, it will be easier to defend, and if you make something sound good, it will be easiest to defend. Needless to say, on the anniversary of Mission Accomplished, the power of words is moot, which is why the subject is so much fun. Still, for debate purposes, clear language that is fair to both sides ought to be the norm, but that would only be true if it weren’t competitive, which means that many debaters will grab any advantage they can, including something as simple as linguistic distaste. If JA has a bad odor, make your opponent defend it. Since the opponent can’t overcome that bad odor, the opponent needs to defuse it immediately and make the round not about something else, but about the underlying—odorless—concept. Good luck with that one.
Termite was among the confabbers last night, and got to formally express his dismay that he won’t be debating the NatNats topic. Or at least I think he formally expressed his dismay: last night he was speaking entirely in Polish, so for all I know he was listing the ingredients on a Twinkie package. Still, I agree with him. As we know, the best topics are always the NatNats topics, exclusive to the annual finalists. In my old Modest Novice days, it would not be inconceivable to simply take any NatNat topic and carry it over for next season’s novices, since it will be, almost by definition, paradigmatic. It will be interesting to see how the new resolution-choosing rules affect the outcomes next year. I remember them as being fairly confusing. Time will tell.
And I’m off to WDW in little over a week. Today’s trivia: Epcot’s Japan attraction was going to have a roller coaster, and Fuji film offered to finance it, but since Kodak was a major Disney sponsor, that was not going to happen. Which is why Figment, the character from the Kodak pavilion, is purple. If he were green, like a normal dragon, he’d be the corporate Fuji color. And I always thought he was purple because he was imaginary… Welcome to the real world. Or the real Disney World (if such a concept is possible).
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Not that I ever complain or anything...
“Resolved: That judicial activism is unjust in a democracy.”
Or, does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
When last seen, sort of, this was, “Resolved: Judicial activism is necessary to protect the rights of American citizens.” So what’s different? What have the secret cabals of the Vatican done to a topic still reverberating through the hallways since its last very recent incarnation? Well, there’s one big thing. It’s no longer set in America.
Uh-oh.
The best way to understand political activism is to realize that it is what judges do when you disagree with them. I go back to all my readings preparing for this topic last year, and the first thing that came up was the lack of a neutral definition of JA. It just doesn’t exist. In the common parlance, JA is a pejorative term, as compared to “judicial restraint,” which sounds oh so civilized by comparison. So, on face, the resolution implies that, resolved, some indeterminable thing that is normatively perceived as bad, is—wait for it—bad. Rule number one in Texas for Memorial Day could arguably be simply to draw aff.
Absent that (and it’s hard to dismiss, but we’ll try), if we merely wish to uphold the original intentions, then whose original intentions? The framers? The ratifiers? I mean, even before the Constitution is ratified, there’s already a practical question of whose intent it allegedly summarizes. I enjoy Scalia’s writings on originalism, but Nino is also by many definitions the epitome of the activist judge, attempting to overturn virtually everything that comes his way (look up the numbers on this, oh ye of little faith).
What the original topic wanted to do, and of course didn’t do, was examine the role of SCOTUS. SCOTUS itself has trouble framing the debate for examining the role of SCOTUS, so for once, it’s hard to simply blame Rippin’ Ripon for a stinker topic. And I do admit for voting for the old NFL topic, if for no other reason than to explore all the aspects of the subject, which was new to me, and which is probably why all the other coaches voted for it at the time. It was educational, if not necessarily competitively sound.
But apparently CatNats exists in a magic bubble where the NFL topic never happened, and they intend not simply to repeat history but to make it worse. Hard as it was to argue the NFL’s JA—if I remember correctly, of the 1,238,273 rounds conducted on that topic around the country during its two months of life, exactly 3.8 were resolutional—at least that was guided by the US Constitution. But what, pray tell, is CatNats guided by? Democracy.
OMG, as they say in the secret cabals at the Vatican. We couldn’t find a way to argue this rez when it was about one very clearly defined polity, with a mature constitution and 200 years of stare decisis and SCOTUS history to guide us, and now we’re going to argue about it for all polities, provided they’re “democratic.’ Who will be the first to wonder how this works with British law? The hair on my head (that’s hair, singular), is standing on end, milord. Italy. Iraq. India? The common threads are… ineffable. And those are just some of the “I” countries.
In other words, we’ve got to tip our hats to the Cats. They’ve done it again. They’ve taken a bad topic and made it worse. Not only that, it’s a topic so recent that there’s absolutely no excuse; they can’t claim that they didn’t know. No doubt the same motley crew who threw out the Pfffft coin toss is behind this madness. Someone, somewhere, thinks this is a good idea.
Thank God El Cranko Grabo is going and not me. My brain hurts already. On the bright side, there’s not much need to brainstorm. Robbie’s already been down this road, and Noah is as enlightened as anyone on the subject. You, if you are heading to Houston, just won’t want to be around El Cranko as he bloviates on this. Endlessly. My advice is to do what I’m doing. Stay home. Play golf. Barbecue some ribs. The alternative—a weekend in Texas with Noah Cranko and the worst topic of the year—is too dreadful for all but the bravest among us to contemplate.
Or, does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
When last seen, sort of, this was, “Resolved: Judicial activism is necessary to protect the rights of American citizens.” So what’s different? What have the secret cabals of the Vatican done to a topic still reverberating through the hallways since its last very recent incarnation? Well, there’s one big thing. It’s no longer set in America.
Uh-oh.
The best way to understand political activism is to realize that it is what judges do when you disagree with them. I go back to all my readings preparing for this topic last year, and the first thing that came up was the lack of a neutral definition of JA. It just doesn’t exist. In the common parlance, JA is a pejorative term, as compared to “judicial restraint,” which sounds oh so civilized by comparison. So, on face, the resolution implies that, resolved, some indeterminable thing that is normatively perceived as bad, is—wait for it—bad. Rule number one in Texas for Memorial Day could arguably be simply to draw aff.
Absent that (and it’s hard to dismiss, but we’ll try), if we merely wish to uphold the original intentions, then whose original intentions? The framers? The ratifiers? I mean, even before the Constitution is ratified, there’s already a practical question of whose intent it allegedly summarizes. I enjoy Scalia’s writings on originalism, but Nino is also by many definitions the epitome of the activist judge, attempting to overturn virtually everything that comes his way (look up the numbers on this, oh ye of little faith).
What the original topic wanted to do, and of course didn’t do, was examine the role of SCOTUS. SCOTUS itself has trouble framing the debate for examining the role of SCOTUS, so for once, it’s hard to simply blame Rippin’ Ripon for a stinker topic. And I do admit for voting for the old NFL topic, if for no other reason than to explore all the aspects of the subject, which was new to me, and which is probably why all the other coaches voted for it at the time. It was educational, if not necessarily competitively sound.
But apparently CatNats exists in a magic bubble where the NFL topic never happened, and they intend not simply to repeat history but to make it worse. Hard as it was to argue the NFL’s JA—if I remember correctly, of the 1,238,273 rounds conducted on that topic around the country during its two months of life, exactly 3.8 were resolutional—at least that was guided by the US Constitution. But what, pray tell, is CatNats guided by? Democracy.
OMG, as they say in the secret cabals at the Vatican. We couldn’t find a way to argue this rez when it was about one very clearly defined polity, with a mature constitution and 200 years of stare decisis and SCOTUS history to guide us, and now we’re going to argue about it for all polities, provided they’re “democratic.’ Who will be the first to wonder how this works with British law? The hair on my head (that’s hair, singular), is standing on end, milord. Italy. Iraq. India? The common threads are… ineffable. And those are just some of the “I” countries.
In other words, we’ve got to tip our hats to the Cats. They’ve done it again. They’ve taken a bad topic and made it worse. Not only that, it’s a topic so recent that there’s absolutely no excuse; they can’t claim that they didn’t know. No doubt the same motley crew who threw out the Pfffft coin toss is behind this madness. Someone, somewhere, thinks this is a good idea.
Thank God El Cranko Grabo is going and not me. My brain hurts already. On the bright side, there’s not much need to brainstorm. Robbie’s already been down this road, and Noah is as enlightened as anyone on the subject. You, if you are heading to Houston, just won’t want to be around El Cranko as he bloviates on this. Endlessly. My advice is to do what I’m doing. Stay home. Play golf. Barbecue some ribs. The alternative—a weekend in Texas with Noah Cranko and the worst topic of the year—is too dreadful for all but the bravest among us to contemplate.
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