Hum.

Hmmm. The Supreme Court ruled that a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors violates the First Amendment. Read this particular line of reasoning and see if you can guess why I find it fascinating.

The justices said governments did not have the authority to "restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed."

O RLY? Does anyone else hear this and immediately start the stopwatch for suits to be filed against Tennessee's "Don't Say Gay" law, or, closer to home, Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal's ruling that the TUSD Mexican-American studies program illegally promotes ethnic solidarity and thus must be stopped immediately? How about local school districts that refuse to teach comprehensive sex ed?

On the other hand, does this seeming endorsement of exposure to unlimited ideas roll out the red carpet for creationists to mandate Intelligent Design for science curricula? Or will the Establishment Clause continue to have primacy over an unfettered universe of ideas? I think this has the potential to become way more interesting than maybe they expected.

Because Predictability Is Comforting

Sonia Sotomayor sailed through the Senate confirmation, with neither help nor consequence from any but nine Republican senators (neither of which belonged to Arizona's stellar brace of senior representation), and the GOP of course immediately began crowing that this was, in fact, a victory. No, not for her--for them.

Although the 68 to 31 vote was a GOP defeat, Republicans contended that they had succeeded at framing the confirmation debate in a way that could influence Obama's future nominations throughout the federal judiciary, including to the Supreme Court if vacancies arise.

In particular, Sen. Jeff Sessions (Ala.), the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said that Sotomayor and Democratic senators had discarded a standard that Obama and left-leaning legal thinkers have held out: the idea that judges should be guided, in part, by empathy. If Obama nominates other people to courts who believe in that idea, Sessions said, "I don't think that would play well. . . . It could hurt this administration in other areas."

Okay, the administration is now officially On Notice that word choice will be a really important factor in future nominations, and hopefully will remember not to reference the value of a minority nom's life experience as, you know, a minority in America in crafting a court that moves just a smidgen closer to reflecting the demographics of, you know, America rather than the membership list of Augusta National circa 1972.

Anyway, perhaps as befits a double Oh Fuck No vote from our senators, the comments on the Daily Star Sotomayor story are predictably fragrant. I'll pick two from a really strong field:

I will not rest until we have a justice with Peyronie's disease on the Supreme Court, because until then, all men who suffer from painful misangulated erections will continue be victims of discrimination and hate.

Hey, it makes as much sense as saying we have to have a Latina Chick who self proclaims herself smarter than white men on the court.

~~~~~~~~~~

AMERICA's FIRST RACIST SUPREME COURT JUSTICE.

Roger B. Taney and Henry Billings Brown clearly don't count as racist justices, see, because they were white men. And, as Jeff Sessions and Jon Kyl and Chuck Grassley and John Cornyn definitively cleared up for us during their Judicial Committee questioning, white men have neither race nor gender, and so can't possibly have a biased bone in their bodies. Also, first guy? Leeeeeetle too much self-advertisement, there. Good luck with your Craigslist postings, and here's hoping you don't use "Onan T." as a handle over there too.

Sotomayor, the Final Word.

Well, it should be the final word, and she delivered it herself.

As you know, my speech was intending to inspire the students to understand the richness that their backgrounds could bring to the judicial process in the same way that everybody else's background does the same. I think that's what Justice Alito was referring to when he was asked questions by this committee. He said, you know, when I decide a case, I think about my Italian ancestors and their experiences coming to this country. I don't think anybody thought that he was saying that that commanded the result in the case. These were students and lawyers who I don't think would've been misled either by Justice O'Connor's statement or mine in thinking that we actually intended to say that we could really make wiser and fairer decisions.

Suck it, Sessions.

Sotomayor Hearings: Here We Go

Clicked over to the live stream of the Sotomayor confirmation hearings just in time to hear Jon Kyl express his grave, grave concerns that she feels foreign law is worth looking at as a means of maintaining America's world standing, and that she might not be able to set her personal biases aside when hearing cases.

Because only white male corporate lawyers have neither ethnicity nor gender.

Thankfully, Schumer is now riding to the rescue, pointing out that she is much more even-handed than people like Sam "Record Number of Dissents" Alito, and has even appeared to be completely color-blind in several instances. Will it matter when it comes to Republican votes? Probably not. Thankfully, it shouldn't matter.

Interestingly to me as a current Arizonan, Senator Kyl framed his foreign-precedents concern in terms of "the will of the American people, as expressed by the Constitution." Hmm. Kyl seems to have forgotten that one of the primary functions of the Constitution is exactly the opposite of that--not to express the will of the people, but to protect the country from the will of the people when the people are largely made up of short-sighted, self-interested nutjobs. Come on, Jon. You can do just a little better than that, can't you?

Oh, wait wait wait--Lindsay Graham is most disturbed by her speeches! And takes the "wise Latina" comment out of context yet again. Oh, and he's convinced that she's going to decide cases differently than he would, so what should he do given that knowledge? He doesn't know what's in her heart, and since that's Obama's standard for voting on judges, he can't vote for her on that basis and that's going to RUIN THE JUDICIARY. He wants her to be able to speak her mind, and to believe in things, and doesn't want young lawyers to feel they can't do those things, but gosh darn it, those speeches are just disturbing, and Lindsay respects elections and Obama won but that means... Frankly, I'm not sure what he's trying to say here. He's not sure she deserves to be here, but she's had a distinguished career and has good character and should be here, but Obama's set a bad standard in motion by talking about hearts and shit like that, so nobody's ever going to be able to vote for a judge again because no one knows another's heart?

Maybe more later. They know she's a swing appointment. Graham's leopard-prints are in a knot because of the 5% of cases she's not going to decide the way he wants, as are Kyl's. And probably everyone else's. I wonder how long this will go on.

Tonight, on a Very Special Supreme Court: John Roberts Guest-Stars as Tevye

Tradition! It provides a sense of cultural continuity and a place for everyone to occupy, lending a comforting sense of order to everyday life--or an oppressive sense, depending on your tradition and your prescribed place within it--and gives us fun things like Fourth of July fireworks and Uncle George picking political fights with anyone at the Thanksgiving table who's within earshot.

Sometimes it has a nasty way of backfiring, though, as our man Tevye learned in Fiddler on the Roof when his daughter, like, totally ran away from home with her boyfriend instead of entering the nice arranged matchmaker-matchmaker-make-me-a-match marriage her father had arranged with Lazar Wolf. Or, continuing the nuptial theme, tradition can be used as a cudgel by people who don't want, say, two people to enter into a marriage that doesn't look like their own--an argument used most prominently, recently, and distressingly, of course, by the DOJ in their DOMA brief for the administration.

Tradition, in short, is a lousy argument for refusing to change a system. And while it's a rationality-free fallback argument when used by anti-marriage-equality people, it's at least as predictable and understandable as irrational arguments can be. When it's the basis for a Supreme Court ruling against convicted people's rights to potentially exonerating DNA evidence, though, it's downright alarming. And that's the tack John Roberts took yesterday when he wrote a majority opinion that punts the question of whether convicts have the right to tests that might prove them innocent.

The "challenges DNA technology poses to our criminal justice systems and our traditional notions of finality" are better left to elected officials than federal judges, Roberts wrote for the majority in a 5 to 4 decision.

Traditional notions of finality. As in, for fuck's sake, back in the day we got a conviction and the bastard swung from a rope and that was that. And now, rather than having trained jurists address the question of whether all defendants convicted within the judicial system have the right to access evidence provided by new technology that did not exist at the time of their trial, Roberts says, it will be so much better to have popularly elected former car dealers and real estate brokers making that decision.

And if a defendant had the misfortune to be convicted in a, you know, traditionally bloodthirsty state like Texas, where any hint of considering convicts' rights softness on crime means those popularly elected officials will be out of their cushy Capitol offices and back on the lots of Laredo? That's too damn bad. Because we have traditions in this country, dammit, and that's what matters.