If I had been a peruser of blogs back then like Think Progress and TPM and The Carpetbagger Report, I would've known the following already:
01/04 -- Chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay resigns, saying he doesn’t believe Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction ever existed.Talk about an "if-then" situation. If I'd known the above (and more, so much more), I would certainly have had a different political frame of mind at the time. But I did not, and so I was telling my colleague that I thought the Supreme Court should move a little to the right as I felt, at the time, it was perhaps a little too far left-of-center.
05/04 -- Army acknowledges it is investigating at least thirty-five cases of abuse or torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
06/04 -- U.S. commission investigating September 11 finds “no credible evidence” linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks; Dick Cheney continues to claim “overwhelming evidence” of a connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda.
08/04 -- For third consecutive year, more Americans in poverty and without health insurance; national poverty rate hits 12.5 percent, 45 million people lack health coverage.
09/04 -- Iraqi Health Ministry statistics show U.S. and allied forces and Iraqi police are killing twice the number of Iraqis—mostly civilians—as the insurgents; officials announce that Health Ministry will no longer provide casualty statistics to reporters.
10/04 -- Chief U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer reports that Iraq had no biological or chemical weapons and no nuclear program before the U.S. invasion; in fact, Duelfer finds no evidence that Iraq had produced any WMDs after 1991.
Talk about watching what you wish for. Since then, Bush appointed two justices, one of whom -- Samuel Alito -- is so far right-of-center that he makes Hitler look liberal, and even McCain had reservations about him. Alito undersigned the unitary executive legal theory that in effect grants Bush monarchical powers. Although Roberts is not quite so bad (who is?), there were some early signs that he may have been more conservative than moderates believed. And those have proven prescient.
Today's NYT contains an op-ed reviewing McCain's stand on a case that went before the Court in 2006 concerning Lily Ledbetter. The reason this case popped up is that Congress was just voting on a bill to try to fix the problem represented by the Ledbetter case -- unequal pay for women -- a vote that McCain opposed allowing to even occur by voting against cloture (more record GOP filibustering and obstructionism). How did the far right Court rule back then?
I feel so guilty for my complicity in supporting a more conservative SCOTUS now. What kind of screwed up logic states that a systemic corporate policy of discrimination is a crime for only six months? Not that the Court's illogic stops with anti-labor legal rulings. It goes deeper and darker -- to the death penalty, state-church separation and the Bill of Rights for persons accused in crimes. What I now know is the absolutely crucial role of a President in picking justices. A horrid executive leads to horrid justices, which is what we saw in 2005. The next president had better damn well be liberal and nominate liberal justices in order to bring back a semblance of balance to the far-right court as it exists today. I'll be doing my part.The fact that workers generally have no idea what other people are making when they start a job did not concern the court nearly as much as what Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, called “the burden of defending claims arising from employment decisions that are long past.” In other words, pay discrimination is illegal unless it goes on for more than six months.
Ledbetter did not even get her back pay. And Goodyear billed her $3,165 for court-related costs.
