Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor
Friday, June 19th, 2009Note: I just posted this opinion in a blog on motherjones.com anonymously. I’m curious to find out more. I’ve found the most recent string of Supreme Court decisions to be quite discouraging. Me, posting on the following blog:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2009/06/kenneth-starr-endorses-sotomayor
“Unfortunately the current composition of the Supreme Court has resulted in a string of decisions that are hostile to even the most fundamental of enumerated rights and appear to be supportive of an authoritarian corporate ruled police-state. Whether it’s Justice Antonin Scalias specious contention that torture is not cruel or unusual punishment, Justice Clarence Thomas’s contention that it is OK to knock prisoner’s teeth out while they are in handcuffs (there was a New York Times editorial earlier in his career on the youngest cruelest justice), Justice Samuel Alito’s total disregard of the exclusionary rule and hostility to the most fundamental rights of privacy intended to be preserved with the 4th Amendment, or Justice Roberts’ specious argument that the 6th Amendment due process rights are best left to the States (contrary to the specificity in both the body of the Constitution and in the 14th Amendment that the enumerated individual rights in the Federal Constitution were the bare minimums which could not be denied by any State), it is apparent that even a centrist Supreme Court appointment would be better than allowing the current crew to keep piling on oppressive precedents. Supreme Court Nominee Sonia Sotomayor is, it would seem, not an aggressive defender of the Bill of Rights, but I suspect she could at least both take and administer an oath of office “…to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States…” without flubbing it. I can only hope her appointment was not more of a compromise with totalitarians than we are already aware.
So what do you think?