Tomorrow is November 30th and the United States Supreme Court will hold their weekly conference, one of their last before they break for the Christmas holiday and reconvene in January. Besides taking preliminary votes on some recently heard cases, they are set to decide on whether to take on a plethora of pending petitions. All eyes and ears will be on the Court on Monday | Read More »
As many here may be aware, the Republican Party is again poised to take over the US Senate in 2016. We’ve been down this road before in 2010 and just recently this year. In 2014, of the 33 seats up for reelection, twenty of them belong to the Democrats. In looking at the 13 Republican seats to be defended, it would appear that possibly only | Read More »
I recently read a rather interesting article by someone named Kathleen Geier, a writer for among other outlets, the Washington Monthly, DailyKos and Huffington Post. In it, she has allegedly “decoded” allegedly Republican/conservative phrases. These, she argues, are designed to confuse the recipients of conservative messages because, after all, it is only liberals and Democrats who avoid double-speak and who speak clearly and truthfully to | Read More »
Suffice to say, for the second consecutive cycle, the Republicans blew gaining control of the Senate and deposing Harry Reid as Majority Leader and, thus, setting the legislative agenda in the upper chamber of Congress. Although the GOP gained a seat out of Nebraska, that was a foregone conclusion. Unfortunately, the Republican Party lost key races in Wisconsin and North Dakota and failed to defend | Read More »
Let me dispose of the most likely reform needed in the Senate- that of judicial appointments. Unfortunately, activist judges today have sullied the entire process. What was once a low key affair has become a battleground between the Left and Right. In the past with the Supreme Court, of 151 nominations, only 29 were ultimately rejected or withdrawn. The most notorious rejection was that of | Read More »
With interest in the recent election, my attentions were elsewhere other than the Supreme Court and the cases before it. To recap November to this point, the Court has heard oral argument in eight cases- 4 involving criminal matters and four involving civil matters. In the criminal matters, they must determine whether if a lawyer fails to advise a client about the deportation implications of | Read More »
Two things strike this writer regarding criticisms and proposals for reform. The first is that a disproportionate amount of the blame for the gridlock in Washington is laid at the feet of the Republican Party. The second is that many view this gridlock as something new in Congress. And while they decry the influx of money as being the main cause of GOP gains in | Read More »
In the previous entry, I noted that the main motivation behind proposals to either reform or eliminate the Electoral College, especially the most recent proposals, is predicated by the Liberal/Democratic assertion that George Bush stole the Presidency in 2000. Yet for all the disdain for the Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, there is another recent Supreme Court decision that really, really just makes your | Read More »
Perhaps one of the absolute worst proposals to come out of this talk of reform is to get rid of the electoral college and decide the President based on the popular vote. These are the same people who also whine about the two party system and the restrictions placed on third party ballot access. So, let’s assume we get rid of the electoral college and | Read More »
Most nominees for political office are chosen through the primary election system. Many have noted that this system tends to select the more “extreme” candidate for either party at the expense of the more moderate candidate since it is the hard-core Republican or hard-core Democrat who tends to show up for these primary elections. However, that assertion tends to miss the point and assumes that | Read More »
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