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Politics : Sioux Nation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (55928)	1/23/2006 9:59:04 PM
From: Rock_nj	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 362466

The Dems probably have a better chance at winning the Senate than the House. Mainly because the Republicans have redistricted in such a way in a number of states to ensure it is very hard for the Democrats to win back the House. What we should be agitating for is an expanded House. There's nothing in the Constitution that says it has to be 435 members. Make it 1,000 members and let democracy decide who represents us.

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (55928)	1/23/2006 10:11:29 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 362466

Carry the battle to them. Don't let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don't ever apologize for anything. - Harry S. Truman

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (55928)	1/24/2006 2:11:49 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 362466

Impeachment hearings: The White House prepares for the worst insightmag.com Issue Date: January 23-29, 2006, Posted On: 1/23/2006 The Bush administration is bracing for impeachment hearings in Congress. "A coalition in Congress is being formed to support impeachment," an administration source said. Sources said a prelude to the impeachment process could begin with hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee in February. They said the hearings would focus on the secret electronic surveillance program and whether Mr. Bush violated the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Administration sources said the charges are expected to include false reports to Congress as well as Mr. Bush's authorization of the National Security Agency to engage in electronic surveillance inside the United States without a court warrant. This included the monitoring of overseas telephone calls and e-mail traffic to and from people living in the United States without requisite permission from a secret court. Sources said the probe to determine whether the president violated the law will include Republicans, but that they may not be aware they could be helping to lay the groundwork for a Democratic impeachment campaign against Mr. Bush. "Our arithmetic shows that a majority of the committee could vote against the president," the source said. "If we work hard, there could be a tie." The law limits the government surveillance to no more than 72 hours without a court warrant. The president, citing his constitutional war powers, has pledged to continue wiretaps without a warrant. The hearings would be accompanied by several lawsuits against the administration connected to the surveillance program. At the same time, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit that demands information about the NSA spying. Sen. Arlen Specter, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman and Pennsylvania Republican, has acknowledged that the hearings could conclude with a vote of whether Mr. Bush violated the law. Mr. Specter, a critic of the administration’s surveillance program, stressed that, although he would not seek it, impeachment is a possible outcome. "Impeachment is a remedy," Mr. Specter said on Jan. 15. "After impeachment, you could have a criminal prosecution. But the principal remedy under our society is to pay a political price." Mr. Specter and other senior members of the committee have been told by legal constitutional experts that Mr. Bush did not have the authority to authorize unlimited secret electronic surveillance. Another leading Republican who has rejected the administration's argument is Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas. On Jan. 16, former Vice President Al Gore set the tone for impeachment hearings against Mr. Bush by accusing the president of lying to the American people. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 election to Mr. Bush, accused the president of "indifference" to the Constitution and urged a serious congressional investigation. He said the administration decided to break the law after Congress refused to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. "A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government," Mr. Gore said. "I call upon members of Congress in both parties to uphold your oath of office and defend the Constitution,” he said. “Stop going along to get along. Start acting like the independent and co-equal branch of American government that you are supposed to be under the constitution of our country." Impeachment proponents in Congress have been bolstered by a memorandum by the Congressional Research Service on Jan. 6. CRS, which is the research arm of Congress, asserted in a report by national security specialist Alfred Cumming that the amended 1947 law requires the president to keep all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of a domestic surveillance effort. It was the second CRS report in less than a month that questioned the administration's domestic surveillance program. The latest CRS report said Mr. Bush should have briefed the intelligence committees in the House and Senate. The report said covert programs must be reported to House and Senate leaders as well as the chairs of the intelligence panels, termed the "Gang of Eight." Administration sources said Mr. Bush would wage a vigorous defense of electronic surveillance and other controversial measures enacted after 9/11. They said the president would begin with pressure on Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mr. Bush would then point to security measures taken by the former administration of President Bill Clinton. "The argument is that the American people will never forgive any public official who knowingly hurts national security," an administration source said. "We will tell the American people that while we have done everything we can to protect them, our policies are being endangered by a hypocritical Congress."

To: CalculatedRisk who wrote (55928)	1/25/2006 8:07:55 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 362466

O'Connor's Rightful Heir? URL: msnbc.msn.com Kennedy may check the Supreme Court's tilt toward the right. By Evan Thomas And Stuart Taylor Jr. Newsweek Jan. 30, 2006 issue - When conservative Washington lawyers who argue before the Supreme Court talk about "the Greenhouse Effect," they don't mean global warming. The Greenhouse in question is Linda Greenhouse, the longtime and esteemed Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times. The "effect" is to subtly push Supreme Court justices to the left. Unless a jurist comes to the court with very strongly held, or even fixed, conservative views, there is a tendency to be seduced by the liberal legal establishment that dominates at elite law schools like Harvard and Yale. Those schools produce a disproportionate number of the law clerks who generally draft opinions for the justices, as well as the sort of professor routinely tapped as a source by Greenhouse, who is regarded as a legal scholar in her own right. That, at least, is the view of conservatives like U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Laurence Silberman, who popularized the term some years ago. The chief "victim" of the Greenhouse Effect is usually said to be Justice Anthony Kennedy, who has drifted to the left since his appointment almost two decades ago. With the departure of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor from the Supreme Court, Kennedy is seen by liberals and status-quo devotees as the remaining swing vote, a check on the court's rightward tilt as more justices are appointed by Republican presidents. Kennedy's linchpin role was on display last week, when he wrote the majority opinion in a closely watched case. By a 6-to-3 vote, the court rejected the Bush Justice Department's effort to block a controversial Oregon law that allows physicians to assist the suicide of terminally ill patients. About 30 people a year avail themselves of Oregon's "right to die" law, obtaining a prescription for a lethal dose of drugs. Former attorney general John Ashcroft intervened to stop the practice, but the Supreme Court ruled last week that Ashcroft had overstepped his authority. Conservatives took some consolation in the vote of Chief Justice John Roberts. In his first significant decision since his confirmation, he joined in dissent with the court's right wing, Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. If, as expected, Judge Samuel Alito is confirmed, conservatives think they will have a reasonably reliable fourth vote. But Kennedy remains at best a wild card; in some important arenas, most notably abortion and gay rights, he has been a winning vote for the court's liberal camp. Kennedy has "evolved," say the liberals—much like other GOP-appointed justices before him, such as the late Harry Blackmun. Conservative lawyers scoff (though rarely on the record, lest they have to argue before Kennedy) that the justice is squishy and vainglorious, too worried about what the headlines will say about him. Other hard-liners regard him as a traitor. He was chosen by Ronald Reagan in 1987 after fiery conservative Robert Bork was rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate and Reagan's next choice, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, dropped out after he admitted to having smoked marijuana as a Harvard law professor. At first Kennedy seemed to be a solid conservative, siding with the state in criminal-rights cases. Some even began calling him "Bork without the beard" and predicting that he'd be chief justice one day. But then in 1992, Kennedy joined the majority opinion upholding a woman's right to abortion. Just before he took the bench the day of the decision, Kennedy told a reporter, "Sometimes you don't know if you're Caesar about to cross the Rubicon or Captain Queeg cutting your own towline." Then he excused himself to "brood." No one was quite sure what he meant by that mixed metaphor, but it was seen as a bad sign for conservatives, who figured they could no longer count on him. Indeed, Kennedy went on to author a landmark 2003 decision that established, for the first time, constitutional protection for homosexual sodomy. "Gay people are entitled to respect for their private lives," wrote Kennedy. "The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny." Kennedy is by no means always or even often on the left. He has dissented, for instance, from decisions upholding affirmative action. But for the time being, he may be the one justice standing between conservatives and a predictable Supreme Court majority. © 2006 Newsweek, Inc. © 2006 MSNBC.com