Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Comments

  1. I want the smartest lawyers in the country on the Supreme Court. Sure, a few of the country’s smartest lawyers went to non-Ivy League schools, but Harvard, Yale, etc. should be grossly overrepresented on the SCOTUS relative to the percentage of lawyers they produce. Frankly, most attorneys aren;t all that bright and I’d be very nervous about having just anyone on the Court.

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    p>As far as ideology goes, Kagan is too conservative for my tastes. I wanted Wood or Karlan. Not getting the best justices possible is dumb. Five SCOTUS justices can make or break progress, but it takes 218 Reps and 41-60 Senator, depending on what you’re trying to do. A Justice is worth at least 43.6 Reps and 8.2 Senators, and maybe as much as 43.6 Reps and 12 Senators, so it’s worth taking some electoral heat to get a better Supreme Court.  

    • With all due respect to my Harvard and Yale friends… they’re not the only intelligent people in the world, and I’ve known plenty of people who I find intellectually suspect who graduated from Harvard.

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      p>Once Kagan’s sworn in, every single justice on the Supreme Court will have been from Harvard or Yale. That’s not “grossly overrepresented,” that’s out-of-touch. If half of the justices were from Harvard or Yale, it would still be “over-represented,” but probably in a much more appropriate way.

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      p>One of the primary arguments made in favor of Sotomayor was life experience — the fact that she wasn’t a pale, white, upper class guy. It’s important to have people on the bench who know what life is like outside the crimson bubble, people who know what it’s like to struggle with rent and be at the complete mercy of large corporations — people who’ve lived in neighborhoods where a person being shot to death didn’t make the front-page of the news.

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      p>You say this kind of over-representation of Harvard and Yale is a good thing — yet it’s leading to  judicial travesty after travesty in their decisions, the worst of them being Citizens United. While I think partisan influence has a huge impact on why this stuff is happening, having an elitist court that’s out of touch of Americans certainly is, too.

      • She went to Princeton and then Yale law. You can’t cite her as an example of diverse life experience and then claim that Ivy League education makes people elitist.

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        p>Note that the justices who voted the right way in Citizens United were just as Ivy League educated as the ones who voted the wrong way. This is a matter of ideology, not educational background.  

        • you’re going to get more out-of-touch elitists from Harvard and Yale than you are UCONN or Berkley.

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          p>Are you really trying to suggest we shouldn’t have a single, solitary justice on the court who didn’t attend Harvard and/or Yale? That’s what we have now — and you just applauded it.

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          p>Personally, as I’ve said, I think it should be no more than half. Go get some law school graduates who went to school in other parts of the country — I’m pretty sure they have some good law schools on the West Coast, too :rollseyes:.  Go get some from public schools. Go get some with widely different backgrounds. The one thing I really like about the Kagan pick is the fact that she wasn’t from one of the lower courts. We need more of that, too.

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          p>Our backgrounds effect our world views — and don’t reflect our intelligence or wisdom, which comes from people all over, regardless of political stripes, regardless of wherever people graduated from.  

          • Someone that knows how to land a plane without engine power, in a fucking river, between buildings and bridges.  You can’t teach that!  That’s the sort of steady hand and clear thinking that we need on the court.  And he’s probably Protestant too.

          • Or even UVA, for that matter.

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            p>But your claim that all these Harvard and Yale justices are out of touch elitists is wildly off the mark. The case you use as an example is one where the Harvard and Yale-educated liberals made the right decision and the Harvard and Yale-educated conservatives made the wrong one. The deciding factor here is ideology, not where someone went to school.

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            p>Unless you can show me a case where the Harvard justices made a decision that a Berkeley justice with the same political leanings wouldn’t have made, this discussion is over.  

            • But your claim that all these Harvard and Yale justices are out of touch elitists is wildly off the mark.

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              p>It’s a good thing that’s not my claim. My claim is that by selecting only people from those two schools, you’re going to get more people who are out of touch and elitist than if you selected from a wider pool. Wider pools, by the way, are always the strongest kind.

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              p>

              The deciding factor here is ideology, not where someone went to school.

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              p>Ideology is a deciding factor, but so is background. I don’t think law school is the only background that matters, far from it, but we’d be a fool to pretend as if it doesn’t strongly influence a lawyer. As for your wanting an example, I think I could leave that toward better minds — but I think a good example of a case where “conservative” and “liberal” probably had less impact than simply having a court that was out of touch was Kelo vs. City of New London, the eminent domain case.

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              p>You’re of course still free to disagree with it, just like I’m free to disagree with the idea that only Harvard and Yale graduates should be on the Supreme Court — with maybe one or two exceptions from X school of your choice. Maybe we should be awarding this thing based on merit, and not personal connections and prestige granted through Harvard and Yale?

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              p>If we want the nine smartest legal minds in the country on the Supreme Court, or the closest thing to it, I would stake my life on the fact that not all of those 9 people would have graduated from Harvard or Yale — never mind if we want the nine smartest legal minds who also have a deep understanding for what it means to be American, rich or poor, North or South, East or West, no matter the ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or religion (or lack thereof). I would be much happier to have the ladder on the court than the former, but even if it’s the former, it’s not going to be all Harvard and Yale.  

              • Which, by the way, was authored by Justice Stevens, the last non-Ivy League Justice (he went to Northwestern).  So … so much for that.

      • And then I got to your third paragraph.

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        p>Yes, that was an argument made in favor of her confirmation– but it was the least convincing argument in favor of confirmation, by far.

  2. What is that, some ship from Connecticut.  Oh, you mean SCOTUS.  Dig it.

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    p>I’m actually really surprised that Brown voted against.  He had plenty of cover in five other GOPs (3 from New England), and clearly he didn’t need to do it because of whipping for the same reason.

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    p>Brownie, heck of a job.  Again.

    • The posters here seem to think that he is dumb (i) when he defies (and antagonizes) his right-wing base in order to make gains among independents; and (ii) when he placates his base in a way that will not cost him a thing among independents.  She was to be confirmed anyway, so his vote was meaningless.

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      p>Which means he gets the “heckuva job, dumbass” routine every time he demonstrates that he is not a left wing Democrat as was his predecessor.

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      p>As an independent, I don’t begrudge him political maneuvering like this; I understand that he has a job to do. I certainly don’t expect to agree with his every vote (I certainly did not for his predecessor). Indeed, so far, I am enormously impressed with the guy.  He has played both poor hands, and excellent hands, quite well.

      • I think he’s clever to cast the deciding vote in favor of conservative ideals when he’s the deciding vote.  Then he’s a hero of the right.  I think he’s clever to cast the non-deciding vote in favor of the liberal ideals when he is a non-deciding vote.  Then he’s moderate.

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        p>Come 2012, few independents will remember the details of his vote on particular bills and whether or not it was the deciding vote.  For a primary (and for GOP/Tea fundraising) he can point out that he was the vote against lib’rul x, y, and z, but in general election propaganda he can point out that he’s a moderate voice — supporting Democratic bills when they’re good and opposing them when they’re bad.  He’ll have a record to back it up.

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        p>He’s already cast enough moderate votes that the hard right folks won’t support him without some real effort on his part.  I believe that casting deciding votes to the conservatives will allow him to win that support.  On votes where the thing is going to pass anyway, why not pad his moderate credentials, since it has no impact on the outcome of the vote?

  3. No protestant?  Who cares.  I think it’s minor, and I suspect temporary.

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    p>I do think Harvard is over-represented on the court, but so are white people and Kagan is white too.  I’m not so worried about it on an individual basis, though I do think a judge or two with some public university experience would be a good thing.  Based on wikipedia, it breaks down like this:
    Undergrad degrees
    Harvard 1
    Georgetown 1
    Stanford 2
    Holy Cross 1
    Cornell 1
    Magdalen College 1
    Princeton 3
    Graduate non-law
    Oxford University 1
    Law
    Harvard 5.5 *
    Columbia 0.5*
    Yale 3

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    p>You’ll note that not a single year of the estimated 66 years of higher education between the 9 SCOTUS members have received were at a public university.  That’s a pretty glaring hole, and one that I expect will change both because some public law schools (Berkeley, Michigan, UVa, UCLA, UT-Austin) have very strong reputations, and because [I think!] the Ivies are getting better about accepting undergraduates from public institutions into their law programs.

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    p>

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    p> * Ruth Bader Ginsburg transferred from Harvard law to Columbia law when her husband took a job in NYC.  An alternative (and reasonable) tally is Harvard 5, Columbia 1, Yale 3.

  4. Not in my opinion, anyway.  Which law school you go to is, however, predictive of entering the elite and making elite connections.  

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    p>But we can agree…to disagree…on that aspect.

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    p>  

  5. … but in regards to our junior Senator, HE IS JUST NOT THAT SMART. He is playing a completely confused game of “Pander Right Twice, Pander Left Once.” There is not one vote of principle that I can count during his short tenure. His explanation is ALWAYS lame, no matter which side he takes.

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    p>The Dems need to find a very smart and appealing candidate, and I suspect she/he will take Brown to the cleaners in 2012 as long as the Presidential race brings people to the polls.

  6. Now that she can “let it all hang out”.

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    p>I was totally bamboozled by Obama, but I’m cautiously optimistic on Kagan – perhaps because she’s a fellow New York yiddishe kop.

  8. Why is Protestant in quotes?  For the record I couldn’t care less that there’s no Protestant.

    • Not being a protestant, or Anglo, or Massachusetts native (etc.) I wasn’t 100% sure what that means myself and figured it might draw some educational comments.

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      p>There was a time when every justice on the US Supreme Court was classified as a ‘protestant’, though.

      • Protestant is generally defined as a Christian of a denomination that separated from the Roman Catholic Church beginning in the 1500s and includes most American Christianity.  John Calvin and Martin Luther were the big names on the European continent and Henry VIII’s split from Rome is generally considered Protestant as well.  In the US we have mainline Protestantism which is often moderate to liberal and evangelical Protestantism which tends to manifest itself politically as the religious right, though this is all generalization.  The following specific denominations are most prevalent:

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        p>MAINLINE
        Anglican Communion (Episcopal)
        United Methodist Church
        American Baptist Convention
        United Church of Christ (Congregational, at least in New England)
        Presbyterian Church, USA
        Lutheranism

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        p>EVANGELICAL
        Assembly of God
        Pentacostal
        Nazarine

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        p>Again I want to emphasize that this is very broad and very brief.  As for the Supreme Court I believe all the Justices are now either Jewish or Roman Catholic.

        • I do think it is a very notable historical fact that all ninr Justices are now either Jewish or Catholic (Stevens was the last Protestant.)

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          p>This is pretty amazing considering that Protestants make up more than 50% of all U.S. residents.We have also had not one Jewish President and only one Catholic.  
          Nearly half of the Presidents were either Presbyterian or Episcopalian. There were four Baptists (including Carter and Clinton).  Both Hoover and Nixon were Quakers.  G.W.  was “born again” as a Methodist.

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          p>Overall, forty-one Presidents have been affiliated with the Protestant tradition, three claimed no affiliation and JFK was the only Catholic.

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          p>Obama is either a Muslim, an Atheist or a Protestant and a former member of the United Christ of Christ. đŸ˜‰

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          p>To have a Supreme Court appointed by these Presidents that has not a single Protestant Justice is incredible.

              • Clarence Thomas is not a practicing Catholic, not since he left seminary due to racial harassment. I believe he attends evangelical services with his Protestant wife.

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                p>Also for the record the religious affiliation of a SCOTUS judge is entirely irrelevant to how they will decide cases and ultimately irrelevant to discuss beyond a trivial footnote.

                • Maybe.  

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                  p>Although I think religious affiliation can tell us almost as much about a person as their age, hometown, gender or race/ethnicity.  And probably effects their decisions at least on the margins, just as each of those things do.

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                  p>Moreover, being “religious” is darn near a requirement for a Supreme Court Justice.

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                  p>Do you believe an atheist, agnostic or humanist could be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice?  With 100 out of 100 U.S. Senators identifying as Christian (85) or Jewish (15)?

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                  p>I don’t.  And that makes the issue non-trivial and relevant to me.

                • but I seem to recall a survey like:

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                  p>”Would you be willing to vote for a for President,” where the blank was filled with

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                  p> * woman
                  * divorcee
                  * unmarried person
                  * childless person
                  * homosexual
                  * black
                  * Hispanic
                  * military veteran
                  * person with no military service
                  * Catholic
                  * Jew
                  * atheist

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                  p>and atheist came in dead last, by a lot.  Behind races, behind gender, behind marital status indicators, and behind assorted Christian & Jewish faiths.  I don’t recall if Muslim was on the list, and I expect that it’s status would move quickly up and down over the past 15 years.

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                  p>In any case, we are a majority protestant nation (barely), a large majority Christian nation, and a super-duper majority Abrahamic religions.  While I think there are oodles of Americans who aren’t exactly showing up to worship one or more times each week, most Americans still consider themselves believers in a single Abrahamic God, and I certainly don’t expect their general uneasiness with someone who has implied that their God is an imaginary friend to be resolved soon.

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                  p>

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                  p>This was POTUS not SCOTUS, and it’s from memory with no citation, so take it for what it’s worth.

                • For POTUS, on the one hand there is part of me that is uncomfortable with an atheist in the Oval Office, on the other hand I suspect there may have been a few already and they just pretended to be outwardly pious for political reasons which is arguably worse. I trust Obama when he says he is a Christian and he has spoken at length in eloquent ways about various theologians that have influenced him. But I also know he made it a point to reach out to non-believers at the inaugural, has sided with secular humanists on church/state issues usually, and doesn’t seem to be active in terms of church attendance and public prayer. Like many things in his presidency it is unknowable what he truly believes and what is a political affectation. Similarly we have elected scores of President’s that weren’t particularly religious. JFK was always a skeptic in spite of being nominally Catholic, Ike joined a church only after public pressure, his primary opponent Robert Taft’s wife once said her husband attended church at ‘cog creek’ which was a local country club. FDR and Churchill were not particularly religious either. So I am not sure how important it ultimately is, as a believer I want a candidate that at least shares and does not scoff at my belief in a higher power, but that candidate also knows this is what is expected and might not be sincere. At the end of the day I would rather vote for an honest President who was an atheist than someone who passed off as a believer when they weren’t.

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                  p>For SCOTUS we have seen very little indication that religion is a factor in determining case results. Catholics have been evenly split on abortion, religious freedom cases, etc. If anything ideology seems to be a better predictive indicator along with party registration and who they clerked for. And once again I suspect the actual religiosity of many justices over the years is not as high as their stated affiliation would suggest. Ditto that quote on the Senate.  

            • …not much.  More than once growing up when I mentioned I’m not Catholic I would be asked if I were Jewish.  In jr. high once a history teacher mentioned that JFK was the only Catholic President a kid asked if that meant all the others had been Jewish!

          • Your claim is absolutely right — 51.3% of Americans claim a protestant faith as of 2004.

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            p>Yet, in 27 of 48 states*, Catholicism is the most common religion, and it spans the country.  This map is a png, so I can’t embed it: religions of tUSA map.

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            p>For those who have trouble, it looks like this — all states are plurality Catholic, except:

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            p>NW: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming: plurality is no religion
            Utah: plurality is Mormon
            Dakotas: North Dakota, South Dakota plurality is Lutheran
            Delaware: plurality is Methodist
            South: Missouri, Kentucky, West Virginia, and all states due south, except Florida, but including Oklahoma: Baptist.  Note also that Texas is plurality Catholic, not Baptist (which surprised me).

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            p> * no data available for AK, HI

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            p>

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            p>So yeah, by people, protestants make up a majority, though I bet it’ll fall below 50% very soon.  In a large survey comparing 1990 to 2008, the following were percent change in total adult numbers (ie -1% means that the percent of adults in America of that religion is less than before by 1).  (ref):
            Catholic: -1%
            Baptist: -4%
            Mainline Christian: -6%
            Christian Generic: -1%
            Other Protestant: +1%
            Jewish: -1%
            None: +7%
            Did not know +3%

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            p>So none and DNK are gaining, and non-Catholic Christian makes up 51% of Americans in 2008, down from 60% in 1990.

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            p>I’d add that protestants disagree on whether or not Mormons are protestant (or even Christian at all).  If you remove the 1.4% of Americans who are LDS, the protestants are below 50% according to this extensive survey.

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            p>I’d also add that the largest population of protestants is located in the Southeast — the region with the least percentage of population who have attained a graduate degree of some kind.  This isn’t definitive w.r.t. religion and law, but it does suggest that there are various correlations between religion and law degree — charge that to bigotry at law schools, culturally different views on the value of graduate education or law degrees, and so on and so forth.

            • The Catholic/Protestant disparity is skewed since there is a single Catholic church (I am presuming Orthodox is not included, though that is surprisingly more common now and growing rapidly) whereas there is not a Protestant Church but rather many different and in many cases radically competing viewpoints. There are also denominations like my brothers which does not consider itself Protestant or Catholic or a denomination, but simply a gathering of like minded Christians. Does a rejection of papal supremacy automatically make someone a Protestant? The Orthodox, Coptic, and Armenian churches would disagree. Is it a historical connection to the church started by Luther? Arguably anyone coming out of the Hussite or Anabaptist tradition (which runs the gamut from Baptists to Southern Baptists to Disciples of Christ to Christian Bretheren to Mennonites to Free Methodists to Pentecostals/Adventists to Branch Davidians) would disagree since they consider themselves Protestants but they predate Luther. Protestant is a difficult term that could mean a great many religious traditions and ideas that might be in dire conflict with one another, and it is certainly ill-defined. That confusion was one of the many reasons I saw the light at went back to Mass.

              • Orthodox are not Protestant.  They are the Eastern Church from which Rome split in 1054 (and yes I think that is the accurate way to describe it since the other four Apostolic Sees remained together).  Coptic and Armenian churches were never in the Roman orbit.  There’s no need to be connected to Luther as that would exclude the whole Calvinist branch of Protestantism.  However, with the exception of Hussites your examples postdate Luther.  I did the old-fashioned thing of looking those up in an encyclopedia so I don’t have a link.

                • I am saying that is why Protestant and Catholic are problematic terms in statistical data sets.

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                  p>Do the numbers under ‘Catholic’ exclude or include Orthodox, they should exclude, but those don’t count as Protestants either. I am in complete agreement, Protestant should not be a catch all term for ‘non-Catholic Christian’ since there are so many varieties of historical churches that protested Rome before the Reformation or apart from it. And so many churches that have happened since the Reformation that one can argue are not part of the reformed tradition per se. Quakers, Anabaptists and their offshoots, Mennonites, Brethern, all arguably come from different historical traditions than the Reformation.

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                  p>Obviously the mainline churches are tied with the Reformation, though arguably the Anglican church came from a political rather than a theological separation. And as a UCC member (as I recall anyway) you can also say that even within the denomination a ‘congregationalist’ runs the gamut on theological matters, since its a statement of church governance rather than theology.  

                • …as catch-all for non-Catholic Western Christians which divided and subdivided starting at the middle of the second millenium (though I have seen Mormonism listed separately maybe because they use a whole additional sacred book of their own).  Anglicanism started as English Catholic then protestantized its theology during the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I.  You are correct that there is plenty of opinion within the UCC, but it is made up of a union of congregationalist, evangelical, and reformed churches which all trace their roots to the Protestant Reformation.  This has always struck me as a prime example of the winners writing the history.  Any attempt at theological diversity up until and including the Hussites was suppressed and often historically labelled “heresy”, but then Calvin and Luther come along with many of the same ideas and were more successful, so now suddenly “heresy” became the “Protestant Reformation”.

  9. He was a former Governor of California and Tom Dewey’s running mate in 1948.  He was the kind of Republican that you can hardly find today.

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    p>Louis Brandeis had not been a judge either.

      • Judicial experience means being a judge, not being a lawyer, right?  Do judges have to be lawyers?  Could an opera singer be a judge, or justice, or only one with a law degree?

        • I don’t know if there is a statutory requirement or if such would even be constitutional.  The framers seemed to get lazy when it came to Article III.  There is no age or length of citizenship requirement either, nor is any indication given as to number of Justices.  It was left to the first Congress to enact a Judiciary Act which fulfilled the charge to establish inferior courts, etc.

          • And there have indeed been a number of Justices with no law degree.  However, all Justices have been admitted to the bar (in the old days, it was fairly common to be admitted to the bar without a law degree).  The most recent Justices to serve without a law degree was Justice Reed who retired in 1957.

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            p>As a practical matter, IMHO, it would be impossible today to confirm a Justice without a law degree.

        • Most judges prior to the 1880s on the SCOTUS and lower courts would not even have gone to law school, but rather ‘read law’ by apprenticing with an older attorney.  

      • Quite a lineup!  The “no judicial experience” Supreme Court Justices.  I hope Deval Patrick reads this thread, or maybe Doug Rubin since the Patrick Administration is appointing a significant number of Justices to the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (which at times has been the farm team for SCOTUS).

          • I am disappointed that confirmation votes are getting more and more polarized and partisan, and I believed David expressed that a few weeks back as well. I honestly think the Graham standard is the best way to move forward, barring any extremist past or sentiment, so long as the justice is capable and qualified than they should be confirmed regardless of an ideological litmus test. That means a yes vote on Roberts, Altio, Sotomayor, and Kagan. And maybe this will get justices to open up about their views on the court a little bit more and lead to more ideological diversity on the court. Right now we have four strict constructionists, four liberal pragmatists, and one centrist. This has been the same balance of the court since 1986 for the most part. It would be nice to have a libertarian like Posner, a liberal minimalist like Susstein, and a die in the wool Marshall liberal like Diane Wood. And unlike religion, race, or gender, I would argue diversity of prior experience and education is a factor and a positive one. I am glad Kagan broke up the circuit judge monopoly, disappointed she entrenched the Ivy monopoly.  

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