Republicans' new 'judicial activism': a coup d'etat of state supreme courts

[MinM]

1. The Appeal: It's the story of the purchasing of a Supreme Court seat in Mississippi. ~ John Grisham

The Appeal was a book I published. It was always a novel. It’s completely fiction and it’s completely true. It's the story of the purchasing of a Supreme Court seat in Mississippi. ~ John Grisham

Judge Oliver Diaz from "Hot Coffee"

Here's more from Diane Roberts' must read piece...

America's independent and impartial judiciary is under threat from a rightwing attempt to pack courts with partisan placemen

Diane Roberts
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 October 2012 17.11 EDT

...The Republicans' biggest target this year is the Florida supreme court – specifically, Justices Peggy Quince, R Fred Lewis and Barbara Pariente, who must win a majority of votes to keep their seats. Lewis and Pariente were appointed by Lawton Chiles, Florida's last Democratic governor; Quince, one of two African Americans on the seven-member court, was chosen jointly by Chiles and incoming Republican Governor Jeb Bush. She and Pariente are the court's only women.

For the first time ever, the Republican party of Florida (RPOF), aided by their Tea Party shock troops, is mounting a concerted campaign against specific justices. RPOF pretends this is some grassroots effort, an outburst of populist anger at a bunch of out-of-touch liberal judges. But the power (and the money) behind the effort comes from an outfit called Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch brothers.

The play here is to create three shiny new vacancies on Florida's highest court, which would be filled by Tea Party poster boy Governor Rick Scott. This is a rightwing wet dream: a forelock-tugging, corporation-loving, quiescent court, which would ignore inconveniences such as the Clean Water Act and the 14th Amendment, and never get in the way of the free market.

"Merit retention" of judges is supposed to be a mechanism for citizens to rid the courts of the incompetent and the unethical. No one accuses Quince, Lewis and Pariente of incompetence or unethical practices. The best Republicans can do is call them "judicial activists", a meaningless phrase they throw at any jurist who rules against them. The great Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954, the one which declared segregation unconstitutional – that's judicial activism. Handing the presidency to George W Bush on the dodgiest of legal theories in Bush v Gore is high-minded and statesman-like...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/08/republicans-judicial-activism-supreme-courts