Posts Tagged ‘US Supreme Court’

The crimes of Kermit Gosnell

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who is on trial in Philadelphia for doping one patient to death and killing seven fetuses born alive. He doubtless seems a worthy candidate for death row. Dr. Gosnell, after all, is a monster. Yet his barbarity never required him to venture much beyond the expansive abortion rights created by Roe v. Wade and its companion 1973 Supreme Court decision, Doe v. Bolton. Dr. Gosnell, indeed, could argue that he had a constitutional right to slaughter his very young victims. If instead we insist Kermit Gosnell should die, then perhaps we must reexamine Roe and Doe.

Dr. Gosnell was a merciless killer, willing to perform abortions at any stage of pregnancy. He routinely induced labor in women more than six months pregnant and then cut the spines of their breathing newborns. This was Gosnell’s “standard procedure,” according to the grand jury report. “These killings became so routine,” in fact, “that no one could put an exact number on them.”

–SNIP– In one case, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. EEOC, the Justice Department argued it “had the right to oversee a church’s choosing of ministers,” which even Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan called “amazing.”

Cruz highlights one exchange between Kagan and Leondra Kruger, a DOJ lawyer, in which Kagan asked, “Do you believe, Ms. Kruger, that a church has a right that’s grounded in the Free Exercise Clause and/or the Establishment Clause to institutional autonomy with respect to its employees?”

“We don’t see that line of church autonomy principles in the Religious Clause jurisprudence as such,” Kruger said.

Kagan, who served as Solicitor General under Obama, said it was “amazing” that DOJ believed that “neither the Free Exercise Clause nor the Establishment Clause has anything to say about a church’s relationship with its own employees.”

The court went on to unanimously reject the DOJ’s claim, saying, “We cannot accept the remarkable view that the Religion Clauses have nothing to say about a religious organization’s freedom to select its own ministers.”

Read more by Elizabeth Harrington at CNSnews.com

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS), the investment bank nicknamed “Government Sachs” because of senior executives who have moved into public posts, won’t be entering politics itself.

A shareholder proposal that the New York-based company run for office instead of funding political campaigns was discarded, according to a letter last month from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which agreed the firm can exclude the measure from its annual meeting.

Harrington Investments Inc. President John Harrington submitted the proposal last year, saying the $6.39 million in 2012 political contributions from the firm’s employees risks doing more harm to its reputation. He said the bank should explore running for office, using a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that corporations have similar political rights to individuals.

Read more by Michael J. Moore at Bloomberg.com

The US Supreme Court ruled Obamacare is constitutional. Legislators in the state of Oklahoma have a different idea.

The New American reports Oklahoma House of Representatives Passes ObamaCare Nullification Bill.

By a vote of 72-20, the state House of Representatives passed House Bill 1021, a bill that if signed into law would stop the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (known as ObamaCare) at the borders of the sovereign state of Oklahoma.

Read more by Mike Shedlock at Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis

This is all over the Web:

You know you live in a Country run by idiots if…

You can get arrested for expired tags on your car but not for being in the country illegally.

Your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more of our money.

A seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for calling his teacher “cute”, but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable.

The Supreme Court of the United States can rule that lower courts cannot display the 10 Commandments in their courtroom…while sitting in front of a display of the 10 Commandments.

Children are forcibly removed from parents who appropriately discipline them while children of “underprivileged” drug addicts are left to rot in filth infested cesspools of a ‘home’

Read more by Gary North at The Tea Party Economist

Eric Holder for US Supreme Court!

From TheFoundersKeeper.com

President Obama may have won the argument over his health reform law at the Supreme Court — but he’s losing it in the states.

Since the Supreme Court upheld most of ObamaCare, six governors have said they will not abide by it. Four others have said that they will not set up the health insurance exchanges the law envisions, and 15 others are considering other options or waiting for the outcome of November’s election.

That’s half the states. More may follow — particularly as they discover how much they’ll have to spend to comply with ObamaCare.

Read more By SALLY C. PIPES at Investors.com

In anticipation that the Supreme Court might rule in favor of ObamaCare, Avik Roy wrote in Forbes magazine that Health Savings Plans (HSAs) would be negatively impacted and possibly forced out of existence.

Read more by Bob Adelmann in The New American

By taking aim at its insurance exchanges, the law’s Achilles’ heel, they can do it in.

Now that conservatives and libertarians are beginning to recover from the injuries they sustained by banging their heads against walls, desks, and other hard objects on June 28, perhaps it’s a good time to introduce a ray of hope that might have seemed absurdly Pollyannaish during the dark hours immediately following the Supreme Court’s surreal Obamacare ruling. Although the voters can put an end to the madness on November 6, the states don’t need to wait until Election Day to take aim at a point of vulnerability that remains in place despite the Court’s latest caprice. They can refuse to implement the law’s insurance exchanges.

Read more by David Catron at American Spectator

Until last week, Chief Justice John Roberts was vilified as the leader of a conservative judicial cabal poised to destroy the Obama presidency by overturning the federal takeover of health care. But with his unexpected affirmation, Roberts suddenly was lauded as the new Earl Warren — an “evolving” conservative who at last saw the logic of liberal big government.

Among our elites — journalists, pundits, and academics — liberal Supreme Court justices are always deemed “open-minded,” even as they are expected to vote in absolute lockstep liberal fashion. In contrast, a conservative justice is written off as reactionary or blatantly partisan when he likewise predictably follows his own orthodoxy — pressures that may well have affected Roberts if reports of an eleventh-hour switch in his vote are true.

No surprise, then, that a surreal discussion followed the recent ruling of the high court. Our legal establishment expected that the four liberal judges would not deviate one iota in their affirmation of the health-care law, even as it hoped that a conservative or two would show judicial character by joining the liberals.

Read more by Victor Davis Hanson at National Review

Forget Broccoli

Americans are either celebrating or damning the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling that the individual mandate is constitutional.

–SNIP– If America wants to overturn current legal norms America needs to elect different politicians. But with a greater and greater welfare-bound population, it seems inevitable that more and more Americans will vote themselves greater and greater quantities of free stuff.

Yet there is a bigger point to all of this, and it’s nothing to do with broccoli.

If Congress can constitutionally create a mandate for individuals to purchase healthcare, then Congress can create a mandate for individuals to purchase financial securities. Which — given the fiscal cliff that we are about to run off, and the reality that more and more sovereigns are dumping dollars and treasuries — could well be a useful weapon in keeping the Treasury’s borrowing costs low and the bread and circuses flowing.

Read more by John Aziz at azizonomics.com

In 1969, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed that there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In the wake of John Roberts’s incoherent Supreme Court flip-floppery, most conservatives appear to find themselves in stage 1 (“Hey, we held the line on the Commerce Clause!”) or stage 2 (“Roberts is a traitor!”). There are some in stage 3 (“If we lay off Roberts, maybe he’ll help us out in the future?”) and a few in stage 4. But the reality is this: Republicans must run the table in November or we will all have to accept the permanence of Obamacare.

Mitt Romney said it best on Thursday. “If we want to get rid of Obamacare, we’re going to have to replace President Obama.” Those who have been sitting on the sidelines, out of complacency or loyalty to someone else from the primaries, must get out of their chairs and get to work. But while that work must end with Mitt Romney in the White House, it must begin with a Republican majority in the Senate.

Read more By Avik Roy at National Review

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s decision to side with the court’s liberal bloc and uphold Obamacare raises an important question for conservatives: Why are Republicans so awful at picking Supreme Court justices? Democrats have been virtually flawless in appointing reliable liberals to the court. Yet Republicans, more often than not, appoint justices who vote with the other side on critical decisions.

Just compare the records over the last three decades. Democrats have appointed four justices — Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. All have been consistent liberals on the bench. Republicans, by contrast, have picked seven justices. Of Ronald Reagan’s three appointees (Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy) only Scalia has been a consistent conservative. George H.W. Bush appointed one solid conservative (Clarence Thomas) and one disastrous liberal (David Souter). With George W. Bush’s appointments of Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Roberts, conservatives thought finally they had broken the mold and put two rock-ribbed conservatives on the bench — until last week, that is, when Roberts broke with the conservatives and cast the deciding vote to uphold the largest expansion of federal power in decades.

So Democrats are four-for-four — a perfect record. Republicans are not even batting .500.

Read more by Marc A. Thiessen at The Washington Post

With the Roberts Court declaring it constitutional for the federal government to require Americans to do anything it wants or else pay a tax, Democrats can hardly wait to expand this newly-invented federal power beyond what was known as ObamaCare, but is now being referred to as RobertsCare.

In honor of the man who made these legislative proposals possible, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are calling them “Roberts Taxes.”

“It has always been the Democrat Dream to complete the full establishment of the Nanny State in America,” Sen. Reid and Rep. Pelosi said in a joint press conference. “Thanks to Chief Justice Roberts, this dream can now come true.”

Here is their initial list:

*Federal Broccoli Act: Eat your broccoli, else pay the IRS $1,000.

*Federal Recycling Act: Fill your blue box and put on the curb, else pay the IRS $2,000.

Read more at To The Point News

From coast to coast, it didn’t matter what time zone you lived in on Thursday; on that day, Americans all entered the Twilight Zone, with the Supreme Court’s 5-4 upholding of Obamacare, and congressional Democrats’ walkout on the contempt vote against Attorney General Eric Holder.

Whether we emerge from this Twilight Zone period whole as a nation or spiral downward into deepening political and social madness remains to be seen.

Those two bizarre events together deepened the certainty that this coming November’s 2012 election is as pivotal as the election of 1860 that preceded the American Civil War.

Read more by Tom Skoch at The Morning Journal