SCOTUS is TESTING us folks with these trial balloons! We need to DEMAND some impieachments...!

... or at least Impeachment investigations of some of these SCOTUS judges!

I am convinced that the timing of all of these controversial decisions, along with the coming showdown over executive privilege rulings that will shortly wind up on their desk is a TEST to see whether we will just "accept" rulings in Bushco's favor over executive privilege claims like we've "accepted" so many of Bushco's other abuses lately. If they feel little or no pushback on these rulings, they'll feel more confident in NOT following precedent from the Nixon days when SCOTUS decisively ruled against Nixon administrations' request for support of executive privilege.

We need to DEMAND that our congress look into impropriety of SCOTUS judges with the possible end goal of impeaching some judges. Even if we can't do so now, just the actions of starting a potential impeachment process might be enough to keep them from ruling in Bushco's favor later. This is VERY important folks! If we want to have any path towards impeachment of Bushco folks, we need to demand this now!

An example of this would be to get Sibel Edmonds on the stand in front of Waxman's committee so that she can speak what the government AND the courts have been keeping her from testifying on. Then we'd have some ammunition to use to put judges on the stand to ask them why they ruled against allowing her cases to proceed to see if it was really about national security, or if it was more about covering up criminal acts (which in my book would be impeachable offenses of the justices involved in helping those coverups) Perhaps not only SCOTUS judges but other judges such as Reggie Walton can be served notice that their ass could be grass if the courts try to support this "unitary executive".

We should assemble here all of the possible cases where we think wrongdoing (not just wrong decisions) but actual wrongdoing by justices have happened that could be used for impeachments.

Another example would be the hunting trips that Scalia took with Cheney before ruling on a case that Cheney was involved with. We need to serve notice on these folks NOW!!!

I think the likes of Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Roberts should be subjected to torture. Preferably the Spanish Inquisition style.

Who should be the first to experience the wrath of the American citizens? I go with Scalia or Thomas but maybe start with Roberts since he is the Chief Justice and then let the others witness the process.

... there ARE some out there that might feel the only way to "correct" this court is through assassination of them. I'd never want to see that happen, but if the mood of this nation gets more and more frustrated, and we don't have concrete efforts to help take back our country in a lawful fashion, there are those that would try to solve these problems through these sorts of means, as undesirable as they may be. Congress should also be aware of that potential too. And that won't start to happen until you have a Democratic President in office (if people are trying to correct the right wing tilt there now). On the other hand, there might be some wingnuts that also want to do the same thing with the left side of the court now too so that they can get Roe V. Wade overturned now before 2009 too!

I don't own a gun or have the desire to make the effort to cause harm. But I have never felt this much hostility towards others. And if I have this much hostility then what is the liklihood that others that have no qualms about making the effort to complete their mission?

Just watching History Channel earlier and it was about the Wild West. How towns handled law breakers.

These scumbags will push just as far and as hard as Bush and Cheney have, in the wrong direction. They want to move our country back to 1900!

We need to push them on this, and make them aware that WE are aware of the real chess game moves that are going on now, and that we DON'T accept them!

The dancing supremes have already done the most heinous and destructive thing they could have done to a Democracy. They overruled Voters and selected our President for us. Citizens quietly stood by and let them. Of course Americans will let the dancing supremes do any damn thing they want. That trial balloon was flown in 2000, and American citizens said, "Ignore law and the Constitution all you want and we wont make a peep."

... which probably explains a lot why the administration has also felt a license to do so much of the damage they've done in recent years too.

The key is getting a more "awake" public to not accept it this time around wherever possible. Heck, I didn't know the true significance of the DLC's influence on the Democratic Party back in 2000, even though I worked on the shared election page as a developer for all of Knight Ridder's newspaper sites for that election. I think the rest of the nation was similarly uninformed of the true agendas going on behind the scenes then too.

about the true agenda. The average person does not want to face the implications of such corruption. Now people are finally waking up to the fact of stolen and manipulated elections. But most people did not see (or did not want to see it) then.

made from the bench.

You may, however, take heart from the fact that some past Courts have been far worse than this one and we have managed to survive.

Besides the obvious nasties like Dred Scott, a quick peek at Schenk v. US should scare the living tinfoil shit out of everyone bitching and moaning about civil liberties and free speech these days.

And that wasn't from a "bad" Court.

I agree that you can't impeach on just that you don't like how they ruled.

That is precisely why you need to find through their rulings clear examples of wrongdoing, such as Scalia NOT recusing himself as he should have when having that hunting trip. That is a clear example of improper behavior of a supposed impartial jurist.

I also believe that if it can be found that they didn't hear Sibel Edmonds' case in order to facilitate covering up of the Bush administrations' criminal actions, that is ALSO grounds for impeachment. That isn't just about deciding one way or the other, but in effect an effort to obstruct justice.

There may be other examples of this too if one examines all of the rulings and actions of this court through the last six years. The sooner we look closely "behind the scenes" for these kind of actions, the sooner they are going to realize that they are under a microscope, where they may feel immune right now from such scrutiny.

No, we cannot impeach them just because we disagreed with their decisions of last week, but we can turn the radar on them full blast and examine areas where they might have engaged in some wrongdoing.

unless there is demonstrable misconduct there...which is damned hard to prove without a wiretap

If she can testify before Waxman's committee and tell us what she does know, and can point out where she thinks the courts were trying to cover her up, and also give indications that there is no other information she wasn't providing to the committee that is a "national security" issue, then it would beg an explanation from the Supreme Court justices why they didn't hear her case. Just the ACT of putting them on the stand, even if we don't hear anything that we can impeach them with, should make them think twice about giving Bushco "get out of jail free" cards with executive privilege rulings in their favor, if they know they'll be scrutinized if they do it for basically the same sort of thing with the Sibel Edmonds case ruling which they also "dismissed".

As I understand it, they declined to hear her case.

If if it was that they were "too busy", then ask why was Anna Nicole Smith's case so much more important than hers? I think that would be interesting to hear their explanation for that judgement. Even if we don't go after SCOTUS judges on this. Go after Reggie Walton for his active dismissal of her cases based upon "State Secrets" privilege. He'd definitely have to explain that more in the context of why it warranted dismissal based on national security grounds. And he's also on the FISA court now too. Just putting him on the stand could lead to more questions we could ask SCOTUS on why they didn't hear her appeal, and also still serve notice that they ARE under scrutiny at this point.

As I noted before, successful prosecutions aren't the important action here. The act of conducting such investigations and inquiries themselves is what is needed I think to hopefully stave off the Supreme Court ruling in Bush's favor over Executive Privilege, which might be the trump card we will always regret seeing played in the future.

So, why not have a beef with them as well? The Supreme Court didn't hear the case at all. :shrug:

edited to add: I've been searching, but I can't find anywhere which judges denied to hear her case.

... more in depth here. I've put up his own Balkanalysis site link to this story here, as anti-war.com is verboten here at Democratic Underground. I don't think I've ever seen anything written by he himself that is of a nature to be banned from DU, so here's the link to his page:

http://www.balkanalysis.com/?p=624

In this article he notes that Reggie Walton was "randomly" assigned to multiple cases and has had his financial history redacted, etc. These kind of actions behind the scenes are what I would smell as things that might be grounds for impeachment, if there is a conspiracy found involved with them. This is the sort of thing that Congress should be looking at now to serve notice on the Supreme Court that they won't have their decisions accepted unchecked and unreviewed.

Thanks.

Is there any way to find out which Supreme Court Judges decided against hearing the Edmonds case?

Since I think it's just an internal vote.

I think the rule is that you either need four justices to vote to hear a case, or the Chief Justice to want to hear it.

So I think we definitely know that Roberts did NOT want us to hear it.

It would be interesting though to see which of "the four" one might expect to vote to hear the case didn't look to vote to hear the case, and if it was just one of them or more.

I've been told by people close to Sibel's case that there is perhaps one or more pretty high ranking Democrats also involved in that coverup, which is probably a big reason why she's having so much difficulty even getting folks like Waxman to hear her case. I don't think I can mention any names here, as it is pure rumor at this point from my perspective, but given that, you can understand why things may be going the way they are going.

I think though it is helpful to keep a list of items like this, where we raise the stakes of why it is important for her case to be heard. Perhaps at some point, there might be enough Democrats that will realize the cost of not hearing her case is going to be a lot higher than hearing her case, and that is when we ALL know the truth and win!

I've never heard that about the Chief Justice can overrule to take on a case. I thought it was just 4 justices had to say they want to hear it. :shrug:

I didn't think there was a way to find out how they voted, and we probably never will.

... if it becomes apparent that hearing the case (through her testimony elsewhere) was vital to repairing our national intelligence systems and getting rid of criminal wrongdoing, it seems like we would have a reason to find out who chose not to hear this case and WHY if they did!

And one of them might be if we have a case of criminal concern where we are concerned about what happened with the proceedings of this court, that we in that case be able to find out how they ruled. Normally, I would think that we could stay out of their hair. But in the case where a criminal conspiracy might be involved, I think this shouldn't be a barrier.

Heck, the executive searched Jefferson's office in an unprecedented fashion. Seems like they've already upped the ante on us earlier.

The Chief Justice does not have the power to decide, alone, that the court take a case.

The Supreme Court hears fewer than 1% of the cases presented to it, so it's not terribly surprising that any one case was not granted cert.

... but I could be wrong on that.

However, in looking at Wikipedia, the chief justice DOES have the power of setting the agenda of which cases that are selected to be reviewed by the court for certiorari, so in effect, Roberts DID have the power to keep Edmonds case off the docket from the rest of the court in that fashion!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_Justice_of_the_United_States



What this means is it's possible it wasn't that there wasn't support from "the four" to hear Edmonds' case, but that Justice Roberts saw to it that this case wasn't included in each week's set of cases to review, and therefore one of the Associate Justices would have to gone out of her/his way to append her case to the docket to be reviewed, which might have been harder to do with the volume of cases than just giving their votes to the cases as they rolled by.

So, though it's a safe bet that Roberts didn't include this case on the docket to be reviewed, it isn't guaranteed that he voted against reviewing it, though I sincerely doubt it.

And it is also even less of a bet that one of the four justices had to have voted against hearing it, if it wasn't on their review docket at all for that term. It's only a shame that Roberts' approval couldn't have been held up a little longer. Then perhaps Stevens might have decided to put it on the docket while he lead the court in the interim before Roberts was confirmed as Chief Justice.

I still think that given the unprecedented amount of times that Edmonds had her case completely dismissed, not just evidence sheltered by State Secrets Privilege, it is the kind of case that should have been heard.

Given that it was the only case that the ACLU actually invited a guest (Edmonds) to speak in their own review session about "prospective" Supreme Court cases for the term it would have been heard had it been selected, it was hardly only "one of the noise cases". They evidently felt it was one of the most important cases in that term.

...true that. Which reminds me, there are legal means to take people like this down, and then there are other means. No I'm not talking violence here, rather, what happened in Peru, where the top guy was videotaped taking bribes -- and then the tapes were aired nationally on TV. He didn't last long after that.

But of course it would take a very brave person to do this. However, if one could catch any of this gang on tape doing or saying something that blatantly shows who they really are, what they're really doing and why, and it got out into the public airwaves, then their ass would be grass. Oh it's true, it couldn't be used in court; but it would already have convicted them in the public mind.

Oh well, dream on...

And that would be hard to argue against an impeachment in that instance. But as you note that's probably pretty difficult to do now. The important thing I think now though is that we serve notice that we ARE going to watch every move of theirs, and therefore if there ARE slipups (aka the georgewbush.org website emails intercepted by Greg Palast), they WILL be taken down through such things, then they might not be so eager to blatantly disregard what America wants in terms of holding this administration accountable later.

If they side with executive privilege of Bushco to conduct warrantless wiretaps, they should be reminded that that could mean that a subsequent Democratic administration and congress could use that privilege to go after THEM with warrantless wiretaps and obtain the very information we need to get rid of them out of the courts! Maybe THAT will change their minds about letting Bush and company claim executive privilege to protect themselves to do this sort of thing.

"The 1803 impeachment and conviction of Judge Pickering as well as several successful 20th century impeachments of judges appear to establish that judges may be removed for seriously questionable conduct that does not violate a criminal statute. The articles on which Judge Pickering was impeached and convicted focused on allegations of mishandling a case before him and appearing on the bench in an intemperate and intoxicated state. Both Judge Archbald and Judge Ritter were convicted on articles of impeachment that charged questionable conduct probably not amounting to indictable offenses."

http://supreme.justia.com/constitution/article-2/54-impeachment-of-judges.html

Judge Pickering jailed a man for contempt of court for publishing a rebuttal to the Judges' published opinion.

they were impeached for their decisions. It clearly refers to their conduct. Now, the behavior doesn't have to be manifestly illegal to be impeachable, but they weren't impeached for their legal decisions.

As to the OP questioning the timing - that's silly. It's the end of the term - it's when the court releases most of their decisions.

I do think there's some timing importance to these decisions, and that they are testing us now for more egregious decisions later. Just wait. Their earlier test of our reactions was that earlier decision they made on partial birth abortions. I think that is what lead to them being more brazen this last week. If they've "gotten away" with these decisions this last week without much pushback, they'll be that much more brazen the next time. It's time to put the brakes on them and draw a line in the sand!

With the decision on executive privilege very likely coming to them soon, that is most assuredly a decision that they will try to push the limits again on, unless we make a move to stop them now!

the timing is simply because it's late june, and that's when the Supreme Court announces most of their decisions.

bad decisions were substantial other problems, and it was those other problems that presaged removal from the bench.

Bad decisions are made every day, but "reasonably" bad ones we're stuck with until someone changes them yet again.

The 'stare decisis' adherence lie comes to mind.....

Would you have yelled stare decisis when the Warren Court overturned Plessy V. Ferguson vis the Brown V. Board of Education decision.

No, stare decisis should NOT ever be held as an unbreakable rule.

promised to always adhere to stare decisis - nor should they have.

... That's the only way they can protect their corporate sponsors!

before the supreme court right now on corporate personhood, or working its way there?

I'd like to think we don't get any more even more egregious precedents set with this court probably ready to set them!

It is what Roberts and Alito were put in place for, isn't it?

between Freedom and Tyranny.

Gangsterism by Loyal Bushies, KKK style but with 21st Century deniability, is just beginning in a trickle, in the South but it wouldn't surprise me if it has begun in the North too but I haven't read about it

When the Good Ol' Boys "can't find" their buddies who did these things

http://harpers.org/archive/2007/06/hbc-90000351

other Loyal Bushies will be emboldened to revive the KKK-terrorism of the 20th Century but in the new Bushie Way.

They won't be so stupid as to burn crosses on people's front lawns. Their merger with the Bushies, essentially the "moderate" aspects of the KKK became the CCC dropped the robe for suits and joined the Republic Party, has taught them the virtues of stealth and secercy.

Right-Wing Death Squads, as the Bushies ran down in Latin America, will one day come here, I propeshy. It may be 10, 20, 50 or if we are very lucky, 100 years, but it will be.

From stories that have already appeared in the MSM, there seems to be plenty of evidence that some of the repug justices were playing partisan politics in 2000. If it can be shown that they had improper contact with repug officials or the Bush campaign, between the election and the decision, put a fork in them because they're done.

To be clear: the issue is not the decision, but the improper contact with parties with interests in the decision.

Just disagreeing with the verdict isn't sufficient. Which is why, if you wait until they DO support Bush and Cheney's appeal for executive privilege, it will already be too late. By looking at all of their decisions NOW, and the circumstances around them making those decisions NOW, we have the ammunition to go after them later if they should decide to side with the president then. Then we'll have more means of nailing them and upping the ante of the cost of supporting this criminal administration. Given the choice, I think that these guys will realize that them staying on the court for many years longer, even through potentially a Democratic Congress AND presidency will be far more valuable to them than keeping Bush and Cheney out of prison or the Hague. But the whole point is that you have to make them feel like they HAVE to make this choice. If they feel they can get away with it, THEY CERTAINLY WILL!

The 2000 verdict is also something that we should scrutinize heavily too. If I remember correctly, Scalia I think also had a family relative on Bush's legal team too. There are MANY places where we can drill down on and come up with things that can be added to an impeachment indictment. We need to start that effort now and make no bones about it that we're doing it, so that the Supreme Court knows that they can't get away with any more support for these fascist conspiracies. In some respect, I'd almost like it if they tried and we DID get something to hang them with. If we can do that in 2009 along with taking over the presidency and the congress, it might even be better to restore the court to sanity than having more extreme sentences being provided to Bush and Cheney gang.

This is why I will ONLY support lawmakers who RESPECT CITIZENS with the truth instead of seeing us as voters to be manipulated with sound bites.

Support the anti-corruption, open government wing of the Democratic party - it's the ONLY way to change how DC treats the citizens.

I'm just sayin'.