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To: regli who wrote (46061)	2/7/2006 11:23:06 PM
From: shades	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Good work Regli - this needs to be exposed - Bush is radically altering our government in many key positions - they said Hoover was the great engineer - I wonder how his position of appointing and shaping government bodies compares to Bush. Didn't hoover threaten the supreme court back in his day if they didn't do something he wanted - I forget the history. Here is something: politicalaffairs.net First of all, the argument that Bush as president has the right to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court he wishes is specious. The Supreme Court has always been a political court and there have been intense battles over the appointment of specific judges through U.S. history. Most of the judges themselves have understood this. For example, when Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great early 20th century progressive jurist, wished to resign from the court because he was over ninety and in bad health, he contacted President Herbert Hoover and said that he would only resign if Hoover appointed a progressive to replace him. Even though he was very old and ill, Holmes told Hoover that his chances of surviving on the court were much greater than Hoover’s chances of being re-elected in the midst of the great depression. Hoover did appoint a progressive to replace Holmes. Popular opposition and leadership by Senate Democrats did stop Richard Nixon from appointing his first two court nominees, Harold Carswell and Clement Haynesworth. A powerful mass movement also defeated Reagan’s attempt to appoint Robert Bork to the court. While those who were eventually appointed were not progressives, a number of them subsequently played a very positive role in opposing rightwing initiatives on the court. Of the sitting Judges, John Paul Stevens, appointed by Gerald Ford, and David Souter, appointed by George Bush I, are the best examples. It is important to broaden the campaign against Roberts by raising the class question, making it clear that Roberts on all major class issues is the enemy of the overwhelming majority of the American people chosen by an administration which received the votes of 30% of the nation’s eligible voters. Anita Hill, an African American Law Professor best known for her role in Justice Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearings, mentioned after the appointment was announced that that the choice of a candidate with Harvard Law Review and elite Washington firm background, hailed as a "standard of excellence" by supporters, makes it unlikely that women and people of color, neither of whom have too much access to such credentials, can ever be on the Supreme Court. This is certainly true although it really isn’t primarily a question of gender and ethnicity since there are female and minority jurists who are no different than Roberts in their support of corporate power and opposition to workers rights along with issues of reproductive rights and civil rights and civil liberties. In the battle against Roberts, progressives should begin to put forward the need to have the federal judiciary (and the judiciary at all levels of government) include labor lawyers and community lawyer representing working people on a myriad of issues from parking tickets to land-lord tenant disputes as against corporate lawyers and lawyers who are professional politicians.