Unreported

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Allison and Jamie discuss the NYC bus strike, The Atlantic: brought to you by Scientology (except not anymore), Aaron Swartz’s prosecutor linked to another hacker’s death, NY Times dismantles its environment desk, Clarence Thomas FINALLY SPEAKS, but no one knows what he said, and another anti-gay activist turns out to be a huge, gross hypocrite.

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war!

Listen to the new episode of Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

Jamie is back from L.A. and apparently scared off an earthquake that made Allison famous, you guys, NBD. Also, why Clarence Thomas should recuse himself from the Affordable Care Act Supreme Court case, Gaddafi flees Libya, and Jamie may or may not be Batman.

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war!

Listen to the new Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

The Supreme Court Justices are asked about their writing processes, and Justice Thomas gives an…interesting answer. Meanwhile, thousands continue to protest in Wisconsin. Also, the douchebag buffer works! Citizen Radio discusses the Huffington Post strike and the first GOP debate some more, including Herman Cain’s insane hatred of Muslim, and finally Joey Biden’s statement about the “waste” of a $100 website for an endangered species, while the US government continues to spend $100 billion every year on the Afghanistan occupation.

The Chicago chapter of US Uncut asked for a special shout-out about their protest this Saturday.

Support US Uncut’s fundraising drive so they, along with The Yes Men, can go expose the evil deeds of tax-dodging corporations in the Cayman Islands!

Jamie will be in Pittsburgh at 222 Ornsby July 1st! Come out and say hello!

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war!

Listen to the new Citizen Radio and subscribe to the free podcast.

It’s been ten years of tax cuts for rich people! WE DID IT, GUYS! Also, how Weinergate has distracted from a larger, much more serious scandal involving Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, and Glenn Beck is now charging his rubes for their stupidification.

The GOP starts attacking Democrats…from the left, Tim Pawlenty wows Americans with his plans to give rich people more tax breaks, Evan Bayh sucks it up and takes one for the team by going to lobby for the Chamber of Commerce, Al Qaeda encourages terrorists to buy weapons at gun shows, Japan doubles its radiation leak estimate for Fukushima, a badass citizens records a police shootout on his phone and protects the footage by hiding the memory chip in his mouth, and Citizen Radio offers some advice about what to do when your sucky job sucks the creative energy out of you.

Jamie will be in Pittsburgh at 222 Ornsby July 1st! Come out and say hello!

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won’t lead you to war!

Digby makes a super logical observation while discussing today’s SCOTUS decision to overturn a decades old handgun ban, which is that this ruling is obviously the work of pro-gun zealots.

Of course, this plainly obvious truth is obscured by a media that refuses to call right-wing legislating “activism,” but consistently labels center-to-left-wing judges and nominees as radical extremists, who should be feared and condemned.

I missed the Kagan hearings this morning, but from what I’m gathering it was pretty much a high tech lynching of Justice Thurgood Marshall. Seriously. Evidently, he was one of those “activist” judges (and a community organizer too, I’m sure)and I think we all know what he was agitating for, don’t we?

Meanwhile, she is an “out of the mainstream” elitist, weirdo (lesbian, NY Jew) who worked for a you-know-what and liked it. Ever since Beauregard Sessions ascended to the ranking Republican position on the Judiciary Committee whatever uhm … subtlety the Republican strategy once had has evaporated into crude dogwhistling.

Right. See, Marshall was a lunatic leftist extremist, but Scalia and Thomas are ideologically consistent.

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Sonia Sotomayor, the Supreme Court nominee, before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday. (Image from Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Senator Jeff Sessions wasted no time today at the top of Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing. The New York Times live-blog reports that shortly into his speech, he said that the confirmation hearing marks a “fork in the road.” Sessions is worried by President Obama’s decision to include empathy as a qualification for the Supreme Court. Remember, “empathy” is that bad thing we don’t want in our judges.

“Like the American people I have watched this process for a number of years, and I fear this empathy standards is another step down the road to a liberal activist, results-oriented and relativistic world where – laws lose their fixed meaning, unelected judges set policy; Americans are seen as members of separate groups rather than simply Americans, and where the constitutional limits on government power are ignored when politicians want to buy out private companies. ….Call it empathy, call it prejudice, but whatever it is, it is not law. In truth, it is more akin to politics. And politics has no place in the courtroom.”

But what Sessions fails to acknowledge is that politics is always in the courtroom, and every justice has their own set of ideologies, biases, and prejudices. Rolling out the fossilized attack of “liberal activism” may be part of more political grandstanding. However, this line of thinking is not only antiquated, but also disingenuous. Two of the biggest partisan hacks on the court, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia (both Republicans) are wildly ideologically biased, and yet they are never labeled as “activist judges.”

Scalia could be called a gun activist, since he is a gun owner, and went beyond defending the Second Amendment in his ruling during District of Columbia v Heller. He said self defense is a “central” constitutional right that requires the ownership of guns (specifically handguns) be permitted so that it can be fully exercised. Crowbarring “handguns” into the definition of “right to bear arms” might have opened up Scalia to accusations of being a “right-wing activist,” but luckily, he avoided such inconveniences.

Clarence Thomas, Scalia’s younger, crazier cousin, is the definition of an activist judge. Check out his dissent in the voting rights case Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder. Thomas was the only one of the nine justices who wanted to throw out Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act as an unconstitutional intrusion on states’ rights.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA), originally enacted into law in 1965, establishes comprehensive safeguards against discrimination in voting based on race, color, national origin or language status. One of the act’s provision (Section 5) requires that “covered” jurisdictions submit any changes in election practices for “preclearance” to either the attorney general or a three judge panel of the federal district court in Washington, D.C.. Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder involved a wealthy Texan district arguing that it should be exempt from the jurisdiction provision of VRA on the grounds that the district isn’t racially diverse (the combined African-American and Latino population of the district is 7 percent,) and the district is too small for Section 5 to apply to it, and the burden of its application is “too great.”

The Department of Justice and the NAACP defended the constitutionality of Section 5 by stressing the ongoing need for federal involvement in ensuring that the Fifteenth Amendment, which bars discrimination based on race in voting, is protected.

The Supreme Court basically avoided making a decision on this case, but Thomas was the only judge to propose throwing out Section 5. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s opinion that avoided a decision on Section 5′s constitutionality. Some legal analysts accused Roberts of rewriting the law, which might have been seen as an activist move, but Roberts is a Republican, who as we all know, are incapable of activism.

Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 v. Holder was an extremely important case because Republicans continue to actively work to suppress minority voting by introducing legislation like PCB-EDCA 09-08 (AKA House Bill 7149,) a Republican-sponsored measure to suppress the minority vote in Florida. By adding impediments to voter registration, early voting, and election day voting, Republicans were clearly targeting minority voters (historically Democrat votes,) which illustrates why the need for VRA and Section 5 are still essential. PCB-EDCA 09-08 is only one example of many such cases.

Unfortunately, Activist Justice Clarence Thomas doesn’t see it that way: “Enforcement efforts before the enactment of Section 5 had rendered the right to vote illusory for blacks in the Jim Crow South,” Thomas wrote. “Despite the Civil War’s bloody purchase of the 15th Amendment, the reality remained far from the promise.” Thomas argued that because seven states, which are covered by Section 5, have black voter registration that exceeds the national average, this somehow proves that the law no longer meets the threshold for being a constitutional exercise of congressional power over the states.

Nor does Thomas think states should be burdened by “second-generation barriers,” racial polarization or “discrete and isolated incidents of interference with the right to vote.” Such an opinion appears to be firmly rooted in Thomas’s own biases and ideologies, which makes him the very definition of an “activist” for his own beliefs.

So please, put the partisan hackery of “activist judges” to rest (forever.) All judges are activists, even when they claim to be “strict Constitutionalists” like Scalia. Even a justice that claims to strictly adhere to the word of the original law must occasionally creatively interpret the arcane language of the Constitution as Scalia did in District of Columbia v Heller. Whenever interpretation occurs during rulings, justices rely on their past experiences, ideologies, biases, prejudices, and yes — the most dreaded of human qualities — empathy.