Monday, July 04, 2005

Quote for the Day, 7/4/2005   My first thought was to go with a patriotic quote, but instead, I'm going with one of my favorite poems, in its entirety:   Those Winter Sundays   Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.   I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he'd call, and slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,   speaking indifferently to him, who had driven out the cold and polished my good shoes as well. What did I know, what did I know, of love's austere and lonely offices?   -Robert Hayden 1:10:24 PM    comment []

A Bad Political Ad   One of the conservative political groups has been running an ad which suggests that liberal doubts of the Presidential judicial appointments are knee-jerk, rather than based on legitimate legal concerns.  We are supposed to have no concerns with judicial nominees who have demonstrated an airy disregard for past precedent, state and federal law, and the Constitution itself in their past decisions.  (Take Janice Rogers Brown.  Please.)  The ad goes like this:  "The President nominated George Washington for the Supreme Court.  Democrats immediately attacked Washington for his environmental record of chopping down cherry trees."  In a sense, the ad is quite right; I imagine Democrats would have some problems with George Washington as a Supreme Court nominee.  Not because of his chopping down a cherry tree, because the conservative ad-makers have quite wrongly and unfairly convicted him of that; the story is apocryphal.  And not because of his likely interpretation of the law, which, though over two centuries out of date, would nonetheless be more progressive than any modern conservative jurist.  No, concern might arise from the fact that he never studied the law or passed the bar.  All of our previous Justices have studied the law, though some seem to have acquainted themselves at best with a sort of Cliff’s Notes version.  (On the present court, I refer, of course, to Justice Thomas, whose understanding of the law can most kindly be described as competent; or perhaps workmanlike; or perhaps workmanlikely competent.  Chief Justice Earl Warren was fairly ignorant of the law as well.)  More importantly, Democratic doubts would be raised over how effective a voice Washington might be on the Court, given he's dead. 7:21:10 AM    comment []