Elena Kagan, and what Obama can learn from F.D.R.

[Project Grudge]

"Franklin D. Roosevelt, in his first term, went to war with the Supreme Court. Time and again, the Court’s conservative majority declared that measures that the President regarded as vital in order to address the extraordinary perils of the Great Depression were unconstitutional.

...

As late as 1937, the Depression still presented a risk of social and industrial collapse, 'the very conditions that in other nations had hastened the slide into tyranny,' Shesol writes. Court-mandated inaction, Roosevelt believed, was therefore not an option.

...
Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., and his conservative fellow-Justices, like their ideological kinsmen in the nineteen-thirties, are engaging in what’s known as judicial activism . A few weeks ago, on Air Force One, Obama, a former law professor, gave a useful definition of the term, saying that 'an activist judge was somebody who ignored the will of Congress, ignored democratic processes, and tried to impose judicial solutions on problems instead of letting the process work itself through politically.” This is, indeed, what the Roberts Court is doing.'

...
The biggest case pending is that of the health-care-reform law. Attacking the constitutionality of the law has already become a conservative crusade; thirteen Republican state attorneys general are planning a lawsuit that claims that the legislation falls outside the constitutional power of the federal government to regulate interstate commerce. Not coincidentally, this was the theory employed by the Court in the thirties to undermine the New Deal."


http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/05/24/100524taco_talk_toobin
the bold=my emphasis.

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This is a great article, even if there are parts with which you don't necessarily agree. I think this current state in American government and the similar financial surroundings has to be communicated with the masses.

[Jennicut]

1. The Rethugs are the activist judges right now, their arguments against liberal judges

are hypocritical. But Obama needs one of the four conservatives or Kennedy to retire. It may happen that in Obama's second term (if he wins in 2012 of course)he may change the court.