Running out the Clock

Let's be frank; it wouldn't matter who Obama nominated, Republicans would have trashed them using most of the same arguments they've used against Sotomayor. And today's article from Ed Fuelner just underlines that. It's the old canard about using foreign law to settle American questions.

Just two years ago a book titled “The International Judge” featured an introduction she penned. “The question of how much we have to learn from foreign law and the international community when interpreting our Constitution,” she wrote, is “worth posing.”

Yep - because that means that when she's hearing cases on the Supreme Court she's just as likely to draw from the the French or Sudanese constitution as the American one.

Oh and get this, Judge Ginsberg said that Judges should be aware that other nations look at how we interpret laws. Horrors.

Of course neither of those quotes says that the justices involved will misinterpret the law based on foreign laws, unless you are already convinced that Justices Ginsberg and Sotomayor are already going to misinterpret the law. Rather they are just commenting on the world that judges live in; there are more laws then our own and there's nothing wrong and possible much good with being aware of that.

I find myself wondering if a liberal Justice said "I really like listening to Miles Davis in my chambers while I am writing my decisions; something about that music gets to me." if we'd read day after day of articles suggesting that this Justice was going to go to Miles Davis rather than the law or the constitution.

But the plus side is that Sotomayor is very likely to be our next justice, as Mike Madden notes in an article about the last day of hearings.

Four days of hearings demonstrated what everyone already knew about Sotomayor: She's obviously qualified, she's not remotely the radical activist the right says she is, and her appointment as the first Latina justice truly will make history. The only question left by the end of the day Thursday was exactly when the Senate would get around to making her confirmation official.

Is Obama Legally Allowed to be President?

Yes. Yes he is. He was born in the United States and is a United States Citizen. A few conservatives, very few, are asserting that this is not true - they held a press conference yesterday at the National Press Club, in which they made several outlandish assertions, according to this report by Salon's Mike Madden.

Taitz -- the lead attorney in the case the Supreme Court declined to hear Monday morning -- kept making stranger and stranger assertions. At one point, she asked why the government had fined broadcasters for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction," but didn't intervene to force the media to report on Obama's allegedly phony birth certificate. She claimed Obama holds passports from at least four countries, compared him to Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver, equated the "controversy" about Obama to Watergate, and finished her tour-de-force presentation by saying that if Obama can claim he's a U.S. citizen and win an election, then so could just about anyone. "If a person can become a presidential candidate only based on his own statement," she said, "then somebody like Osama bin Laden, theoretically, can come and write a statement, 'I'm eligible,' and we should put him on the ballot, too?"

Now here's a sentence I didn't think I'd ever write; let's turn to David Horowitz for some perspective.

Conservatives are supposed to respect the organic nature of human societies. Ours has been driven by profound disagreements that have been deepening over many years. We are divided not only about political facts and social values, but also about what the Constitution itself means. The crusaders on this issue choose to ignore these problems and are proposing to deny the will of 64 million voters by appealing to 5 Supreme Court Justices (since no one is delusional enough to think that the 4 liberal justices are going to take the presidency away from Obama). What kind of conservatism is this?

It is not conservatism; it is sore loserism and quite radical in its intent.

I suppose it says something about these claims that even a guy like Horowitz finds them a distraction. And that something is that these claims are very very shaky indeed.

Body Movin'

I am quietly pleased with the Super Tuesday Primaries. Both races are still going on, which seems goofy, but there you go. Obama and Hilllary are still basically tied, which doesn't bother me at all.

As for the Republican side, I like how Mike Madden puts it in his article on the race over at Salon.

One thing was clear as Super Tuesday came to a close: The speechwriters had their work cut out for them. All three leading candidates delivered remarks that were not quite roars of victory, not quite sighs of defeat. John McCain won enough states and enough delegates Tuesday night to claim he had triumphed, yet not enough to get his rivals to agree with him. Mike Huckabee racked up win after win in the South, gleefully declaring his campaign relevant again, but he couldn't put together much support anywhere else. And Mitt Romney continued to mop up contests where he had no competition, while losing in states where he actually had to fight for it.

It's kind of easy to win when there's no competition.

I also like the fact that Romney is going to pretend to run an outsider campaign. There's a special kind of blindness in Republicans that let's them pretend a wealthy white guy who look like Romney is some kind of persecuted outside simply because the voters preferred another guy to him. Bizarre. But it might work.

Huckabee and McCain and Romney

Well Mitt won big last night, sort of. Low turn out, but those who did turn out seemed to favor him over McCain and Huckabee. As Mike Madden at Salon points out, his ties to the state may have helped him, but it goes without saying that he doesn't have those ties everywhere.

I guess this is good news for the Republican Party, because, according to noted recounter Rush Limbaugh, the party nominating Huckabee or McCain would not be good for the party.

I'm here to tell you, if either of these two guys [McCain or Huckabee] get the nomination, it's going to destroy the Republican Party, it's going to change it forever, be the end of it. A lot of people aren't going to vote. You watch.

So that's something to look forward to. We'll have to see what South Carolina says.