Conservative judges urged to ignore unfriendly SCOTUS rulings

[dajoki]

Slate
http://www.slate.com/id/2143308/?nav=fo

Kennedy Made Me Do It
How one Supreme Court Justice makes all conservatives stupid.
By Dahlia Lithwick

Posted Thursday, June 8, 2006, at 4:35 PM ET

Poor Anthony Kennedy is taking it in the chops again. A candidate for the Alabama Supreme Court more or less ran his entire campaign against Justice Kennedy's opinion in Roper v. Simmons—the 2005 decision that barred states from executing juvenile criminals. Then The Wall Street Journal laid the entire blame for the Senate's astonishingly futile and gratuitous gay-marriage debate directly on Kennedy's doorstep. And an excerpt from the new book by Ann Coulter's breasts suggests that he is somehow responsible for the ban on prayer in public schools.

Why is it that whenever conservatives behave stupidly, they blame it on Justice Kennedy? Liberals are equally capable of the stupidity. But they don't go around blaming Antonin Scalia for it.

Consider Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker.* Apparently he didn't like Kennedy's majority opinion in Roper. Fair enough. But Parker didn't just express his disapproval, he urged his colleagues on the Alabama Supreme Court to ignore the Roper ruling altogether when they faced a substantially similar case last winter. He chose to talk to them about the matter in a January op-ed in the Birmingham News that reads less like legal argument than Fox News talking points. Urging his brethren to bypass Roper because it was "the unconstitutional opinion of five liberal justices on the U.S. Supreme Court," Parker wrote: "State supreme court judges should not follow obviously wrong decisions simply because they are 'precedents.' ... judge takes an oath to support the Constitution—not to automatically follow activist judges who believe their own evolving standards of decency trump the text of the Constitution."

Parker, who got clocked this week at the polls, was rendered this frantic because, he claimed, Kennedy "based" his opinion in Roper "on foreign law." Parker wasn't really discussing Roper, though. He was, in fact, declaring Alabama's independence from the U.S. Supreme Court, a court dominated by "establishment liberals" who "look down on the pro-family policies, Southern heritage, evangelical Christianity, and other blessings of our great state."

{snipped by DU Admin}

[Erika]

1. The integrity of the Supreme Court is dead

Another partisan victim of George W Bush. He has made it a Court of the theocratic right.

[ThoughtCriminal]

2. "Polls show that public respect for the Supreme Court is falling."

Sure Parker - as the Republican Majority on the SCOTUS has grown.

Most of us lost respect after Bush v Gore.

[Erika]

3. Yes, indeed

W became president by a partisan Court. Even though more Americans voted for Gore than W, they chose to ignore the will of the American people and go partisan instead to get W in there.

The Republicans made our Supreme Court a laughing stock.

[rwenos]

4. Boogeyman Politics

Alabama Judge Parker is just practicing the Hitler/Goebbels tactic of appointing a boogeyman, then blaming everything on that.

The joke about it is that Justice Kennedy is about the only justice left in the center of the Court. By that I mean the only justice left who will reason through legal problems and make calls based on the arguments and common sense -- except of course for Justices Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer (whom I usually agree with anyway).

This is a Southern jackass politician blaming people outside his state for things that go on inside his state. There's a long tradition of it -- remember Lester Maddox? Strom Thurmond? Jesse Helms?

[beyurslf]

5. The entire basis of legal precedents for death penalty cases is

the evolving standard of decency. It has been such for 40 years since the first cases were brought to the court. Liberal and conservative courts alike have used it.