“A Question of Integrity” examines growing concerns about ethically questionable and overtly political behavior by some Supreme Court justices, and explores the need the need to apply the same ethical standards that govern every other judge in the federal court system to the nation’s highest court. Viewers are called to action in support of reforms essential to preserve the integrity of our most important legal institution.
“Even a liar can be scared into telling the truth, same as an honest man can be tortured into telling a lie.”
– William Faulkner, from Light in August (1932)
The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson
It seems almost inevitable that about this time every year, while joining the rest of the press in searching the world over for a good man or woman to highlight as the person of the year, I sort of feel like Diogenes the Cynic, who you may recall from the story, supposedly walked around naked and homeless in ancient Athens, Greece — holding up a lantern looking for an honest man.
While none of Diogenes’ writings actually survive from his time of about 400 years before Jesus trod the earth, the tale has been passed down through history in many forms over the generations. The story of Diogenes is remembered as a lesson in ethics. He mocked the idea of finding true human virtue and even the idea that we could ever really know the truth about human nature.
The most famous such search in the modern media, of course, is Time magazine’s cover story on the person of the year. For 2010, the magazine named Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them, for creating a new system of exchanging information and for changing how we live our lives.”
As a recent convert to Facebook myself, I can see why the editors made that choice, although it clearly remains to be seen whether Zuckerberg’s creation will ultimately be used for good or evil. It allows for some amazing connections to be made and helps citizens bypass traditional barriers to knowledge, but it also has a couple of serious down sides. The loss of individual privacy for one.
Then, it is another tool that continues to allow the hyper concentration of wealth into the hands of too few people, a problem that will plague this country until enough people face the facts and fight to turn the tide. Perhaps we can use Facebook to do just that — unless they screw it up and corporatize it, which seems to be the direction the Internet is going like every technology that came before.
The High Court Ruled ‘Unwisely’ in Both Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United vs. FCC in 2009
Scott Pelley interviews Justice John Paul Stevens upon his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court after 35 years. He talks about the damage the court did to the institution and the country in both rulings.
Excerpts
Justice John Paul Stevens has shaped more American history than any Supreme Court justice alive. And for most of his 35 years on the court, he followed the usual tradition: declining to talk about his cases in interviews. As he prepared to retire, “60 Minutes” and correspondent Scott Pelley hoped he would overrule that custom and talk with us about the decisions that have changed our times.
It was Stevens who forced a showdown with President Bush over the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, and Stevens who tried to stop the court from deciding the presidential election of 2000.
The inmates took over the political asylum on Tuesday as a flood of bitter tea spilled all over the American landscape like a bloodbath, leaving the poor and the foundering middle class even more at the mercy of the rich and powerful, including corporations that now dominate life in the United States in a way no one has seen since the Robber Barons at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century.
Incomplete returns showed the Republican Party picking up at least 60 House seats, far more then they needed to take over a majority in Congress where they are now in a position to control the national political calendar, the Congressional agenda and all the committees where government policy is largely set in the U.S.
“A Republican takeover of the House ushers in a new era of divided government after two years in which Obama and fellow Democrats pushed through an economic stimulus bill, a landmark health care measure and legislation to rein in Wall Street after the near collapse of the economy in 2008,” according to the staunchly mainstream Associated Press.
Yet not all the tea party insurgents won, according to the AP and other news outlets.
The arch-conservative University of Alabama Law School, with an active Federalist Society chapter, was the perfectly sympathetic setting this week for what most American legal experts would consider shockingly inappropriate political remarks by the Chief Justice of the United State Supreme Court.
While the University of Alabama national championship football team was being honored at the White House by President Barack Obama this week, Chief Justice John Roberts traveled to Tuscaloosa to deliver an incredibly boring academic speech, which wasn’t the point of his visit. Not one news organization quoted from it in their report.
Roberts knew full well he would be asked about the still stinging controversy between the conservative wing of the court and the president over a recent ruling favoring corporations in funding political campaigns, and remarks from the president during his first State of the Union address. And he knew he would have a sympathetic crowd with no protesters, since Alabama is a conservative state about as deeply enmeshed in the corrupt politicization of justice as any in the country.
The nation’s high court issued a 5 to 4 ruling in January that overturned a century of precedent on the ability of Congress to limit corporate contributions to political campaigns, a precedent that dates to the time of muckraking journalists and President Theodore Roosevelt’s Trust Busting days against the powerful influence of early monopoly corporations such as Standard Oil.
The Roberts court, or really the Bush court since President George W. Bush appointed two of the most conservative members, including Roberts, ruled that corporations and unions have a First Amendment right to use their general treasuries and profits to spend freely on political ads for and against specific candidates. That ruling overturned previous Supreme Court precedents and well established federal law.
While the decision was hailed by conservatives, libertarians and a few liberals as a victory for free political speech, Obama denounced it in the State of the Union address, saying it overturned a century of established legal precedent and would lead to the bankrolling of elections “by America’s most powerful interests.”
It was a powerful moment when the president said it looking down at the members of the Supreme Court, required by tradition to be present for the address, sitting right in the front row of the House chamber.
But the controversy didn’t end there. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., another Bush appointee, violated judicial custom, according to experts, by silently mouthing “not true” when the president made the remark about it overturning a century of precedent.
When Roberts was asked about the moment by a law student at Alabama, he said anybody can criticize the Supreme Court “without any qualm.”
“Some people, I think, have an obligation to criticize what we do, given their office,” he said, “if they think we’ve done something wrong.”
Locust Fork News-Journal editor and publisher Glynn Wilson was interviewed Thursday by the OpEd News on the first year of Barack Obama’s presidency and the subject of change.
Here’s the blurb and link.
It’s only been a year since we got rid of Bush. Y’all remember W, the worst president in history, right? So yeah, we got change. We got rid of the corporate Republican cabal running the country into the ground. Is Obama moving fast enough on all fronts to satisfy every liberal groups’ demands and all the promises of the campaign? No, of course not. Remember, it took 8 years for Clinton-Gore to balance the budget and get our economy back on track. Remember the “peace dividend?”
The Supreme Court of the United States handed down a decision today that will enhance the ability of the deepest-pocketed special interests to influence elections and the U.S. Congress, according to a pair of leading national campaign finance reform organizations, Common Cause and Public Campaign.
The decision in Citizens United v. the Federal Election Commission, which overturned the ban on independent expenditures by corporations, paves the way for unlimited corporate and union spending in elections.
“The Roberts Court today made a bad situation worse,” said Common Cause President Bob Edgar. “This decision allows Wall Street to tap its vast corporate profits to drown out the voice of the public in our democracy. The path from here is clear: Congress must free itself from Wall Street’s grip so Main Street can finally get a fair shake. We need to change the way America pays for elections. Passing the Fair Elections Now Act would give us the best Congress money can’t buy.”
“This decision means more business as usual in Washington, stomping on voters’ hope for change,” said Nick Nyhart, president and CEO of Public Campaign. “Congress must take on the insider Washington money culture if it wants to make the changes voters are demanding. The way to do that is by passing the Fair Elections Now Act.”
The Senate confirmed Sonia Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice on the Supreme Court on Thursday by a vote of 68-31. President Barack Obama’s first high court nominee, she becomes the 111th justice and just the third woman to serve, according to the AP.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow discusses what her impact on the court might be.
So much for Jeff Sessions’ 15-minutes of fame. He couldn’t find the dirt to derail her, but by voting against her anyway, he costs the
GOP even more Hispanic votes and further dooms his party to the dustbin of history with only the solid support of white males in the Deep South.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
