Everybody decides on who they will vote for based on different issues. While junior given people more reasons than any president in history not to vote for him---
>took us to war for unproven reasons
>steering America towards a one party fascist state
>doing the bare minimum to fight terrorism
>corporate welfare
>tax cuts aimed almost entirely at the rich
>rape of the environment
>turned surplus into gigantic deficit
>federal debt allowed to soar
>taking away of freedoms (patriot act)
>grabing more and more power for the executive branch
>curtailing stem cell research
>mars, hubble, secrecy, cronyism, incompetence, etc, etc, etc.
These are but a few of the many reasons not to vote for junior this fall but the above list lacks one of the more important reasons not to vote for junior and that reason is detailed in the following article.
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Courting Disaster
May 2004
Message from President Ralph G. Neas
One of the most important issues for Americans to consider in this crucial election year is the future of the U.S. Supreme Court.
When People For the American Way Foundation published the first edition of Courting Disaster in 2000, the far right had made clear that they would seek to convince the next president to nominate justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the two most right wing justices on the Supreme Court, to fill future Court vacancies. Presidential candidate George W. Bush had said that he would in fact use Justices Scalia and Thomas as his models for future appointees. So we set out to determine what it would mean for American law and society if the next vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court were filled with people who share the far-right legal philosophy of Justices Scalia and Thomas.
Our research documented in compelling detail that a Court controlled by justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas would reverse decades of legal and social justice accomplishments, turning back the clock on civil rights, privacy and reproductive choice, environmental protection, separation of church and state, worker and consumer rights, and more. Because most cases that raise fundamental constitutional questions before the Supreme Court are now decided by slim majorities, it would take just one or two more appointments to give Scalia and Thomas the power to reshape the Constitution and restrict the federal government’s ability to protect individual rights and pursue the common good – for decades to come.
This updated report, which examines the dissenting and concurring opinions of Justices Scalia and Thomas through May 1, 2004, makes an even more compelling case for the dangers of a Supreme Court dominated by their judicial philosophies. Scalia and Thomas have continued to push the Court to the right and to dissent angrily from important decisions that have upheld privacy, equal opportunity, and other rights. And it is even more likely that the next president will have the opportunity to nominate more than one Supreme Court justice.
In 2004, with a presidential election once again focusing public attention on important issues, we have reached a crucial “teachable moment.” We have an important opportunity to discuss the future of the Supreme Court and the dangers of a Court dominated by justices like Scalia and Thomas. This updated version of Courting Disaster is published with the hope that it will help focus and inform the public debate, and spur a far broader national conversation about the real impact of a far-right dominated Supreme Court on Americans’ lives and liberties.
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The next Supreme Court justices could prove decisive on fundamental questions that could shape for generations how America works and how Americans live: Will the Supreme Court further undermine the federal government’s ability to safeguard the air we breathe and the water we drink? Will the courts abandon their role in preserving Americans’ right to privacy and strip women of the constitutional right to make their own family planning and reproductive choices? Will Congress lose the power to protect Americans’ civil rights from abuses by state governments and others? Will the Voting Rights Act be applied so narrowly that it fails to protect citizens’ most fundamental rights?
So far, President Bush has unfortunately provided significant evidence that he was serious about his campaign pledge to use Scalia and Thomas as his models for Supreme Court nominees. In making nominations to the appeals courts, President Bush has drawn heavily from the ranks of lawyers and judges at the forefront of a legal movement to impose a pre-New Deal approach to the U.S. Constitution. Under the banner of “federalism,” this movement seeks to take America back to an era when states’ rights and property rights were given far greater weight than protecting individuals’ rights, and Congress was prohibited from taking action to address issues of urgent importance, such as poverty among the elderly and lack of access to health care.
Accordingly, it is crucial that senators, the media, and the American public examine the impact on American law and society of a Supreme Court dominated by justices who are not committed to protecting individual liberties nor to preserving the legal and social justice progress that Americans have made over the past seven decades. All federal candidates and all federal officeholders should be urged not to support the appointment of far-right justices for the Supreme Court.
It has been almost ten years since the last U.S. Supreme Court vacancy, the longest interval between nominations in 181 years. Indeed, over the past half century, there has been on the average one Supreme Court nomination every two years. It is extremely likely that the president elected this fall will have the opportunity to appoint one, two or as many as three of the Court’s nine justices.
Religious Right and far-right leaders are using the future of the Supreme Court as a major campaign issue, as they did in 2000. It is urgent that debate and consideration by the entire public over future nominees to the Supreme Court focus intently on crucial constitutional and other questions over which the current Court is closely divided, including the existence of a constitutional right to privacy, the authority of the federal government to enact and enforce civil rights and environmental protections, the separation of church and state, and more. Dozens of rights and legal protections Americans count on are just one or two Supreme Court justices away from being dismantled.
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Far-right justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have led the destructive revival of a once-discredited “states’ rights” approach to the Constitution. A series of 5-4 decisions have embraced new theories advanced by right-wing legal advocates, weakening federal civil rights protections and declaring other urgent issues off limits to action by the U.S. Congress. But even more important, Scalia and Thomas have staked out in their written dissents and concurring opinions a burning desire to have the Court move much more aggressively to overturn decades of Supreme Court precedent than even the current conservative majority has been unwilling to do.
Scalia and Thomas, like many Bush administration officials and judicial nominees, are affiliated with the Federalist Society, which has held seminars on returning the nation’s constitutional framework to a pre-New Deal era. (For more information on the philosophy and extraordinary influence of the Federalist Society on the Bush administration and its judicial selection process, see The Federalist Society: From Obscurity to Power, published by People For the American Way Foundation and available at www.pfaw.org/go/federalist_society.)
A Supreme Court committed to advancing the Scalia-Thomas agenda would not only bring about the reversal of more than half a century of legal and social justice accomplishments, but could also herald a return to a situation America faced in the first third of the 20th Century, when progressive legislation adopted by Congress and signed by the President was repeatedly rejected on constitutional grounds by the Supreme Court. A Court dominated by the states’ rights judicial philosophy could prevent the federal government from taking action on a range of national issues, regardless of who is elected to the White House or Congress. Decisions made by the public, president and senators over the next year or two could determine the law of the land and the direction of the country for a generation or more.
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