David Souter Will Retire in June
NPR broke the news about two hours ago:
NPR has learned that Supreme Court Justice David Souter is planning to retire at the end of the current court term.
The vacancy will give President Obama his first chance to name a member of the high court and begin to shape its future direction.
At 69, Souter is nowhere near the oldest member of the court. In fact, he is in the younger half of the court’s age range, with five justices older and just three younger. So far as anyone knows, he is in good health. But he has made clear to friends for some time that he wanted to leave Washington, a city he has never liked, and return to his native New Hampshire. Now, according to reliable sources, he has decided to take the plunge and has informed the White House of his decision.
Factors in his decision no doubt include the election of President Obama, who would be more likely to appoint a successor attuned to the principles Souter has followed as a moderate-to-liberal member of the court’s more liberal bloc over the past two decades.
In addition, Souter was apparently satisfied that neither the court’s oldest member, 89-year-old John Paul Stevens, nor its lone woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had cancer surgery over the winter, wanted to retire at the end of this term. Not wanting to cause a second vacancy, Souter apparently had waited to learn his colleagues’ plans before deciding his own.
Given his first appointment to the high court, most observers expect Obama will appoint a woman, since the court currently has only one female justice and Obama was elected with strong support from women. But an Obama pick would be unlikely to change the ideological makeup of the court.
He-Said, She-Said, or Compliance With the Law?
Politico’s Glenn Thrush continues the Republican meme of Nancy Pelosi complaining that she didn’t know detainees were being waterboarded when she was fully briefed about it in 2002:
The Last Republican Moderate
Kudos to Olympia Snowe — one of two remaining moderates in the Republican Party — for putting the blame for Arlen Specter’s party switch where it belongs:
It is disheartening and disconcerting, at the very least, that here we are today — almost exactly eight years after Senator Jim Jeffords left the Republican Party — witnessing the departure of my good friend and fellow moderate Republican, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, for the Democratic Party. And the announcement of his switch was all the more painful because I believe it didn’t have to be this way.
[...]
It is true that being a Republican moderate sometimes feels like being a cast member of “Survivor” — you are presented with multiple challenges, and you often get the distinct feeling that you’re no longer welcome in the tribe. But it is truly a dangerous signal that a Republican senator of nearly three decades no longer felt able to remain in the party.
Senator Specter indicated that his decision was based on the political situation in Pennsylvania, where he faced a tough primary battle. In my view, the political environment that has made it inhospitable for a moderate Republican in Pennsylvania is a microcosm of a deeper, more pervasive problem that places our party in jeopardy nationwide.
I have said that, without question, we cannot prevail as a party without conservatives. But it is equally certain we cannot prevail in the future without moderates.
In that same vein, I am reminded of a briefing by a prominent Republican pollster after the 2004 election. He was asked what voter groups Republicans might be able to win over. He responded: women in general, married women with children, Hispanics, the middle class in general, and independents.
How well have we done as a party with these groups? Unfortunately, the answer is obvious from the results of the last two elections. We should be reaching out to these segments of our population — not de facto ceding them to the opposing party.
There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities — indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.
Judging by the reaction in right-wing circles to Sen. Specter’s move, not only is the GOP not listening — they are drawing the circle of wagons in even tighter.
All links via Memeorandum.
Arlen Specter Leaves the Party of No
Everybody’s heard the news by now. Here’s a roundup of commentary and reaction in blogtopia and elsewhere.
Jonathan Chait thinks Arlen Specter is an “unprincipled hack.”
I think that’s a bit harsh. Obviously, Specter’s poor nonexistent chances of winning the Republican primary in 2010 factored into his thinking, but he’s apparently been mulling over this move for a long time. Besides, it’s kinda obvious by now that the Republican Party doesn’t want any moderates in its midst.
Here’s Arlen Specter’s press statement.
GOP reaction?
Specter is a hypocrite and a traitor.
He is “not only disrespectful, but downright rude.”
The Club for Growth was too shocked for words.
At Power Line, Paul tells us Specter is an opportunist and John cannot quite remember Meg Ryan’s name.
William Kristol: “Good news for Republicans.”
Rush Limbaugh: “Take McCain and his daughter with you. … It’s ultimately good. You’re weeding out people who aren’t really Republicans.”
Meghan’s return slam: “RED TIL I’M DEAD BABY!!! I love the republican party enough to give it constructive criticism, I love my party and sure as hell not leavin!”
Maybe we’ll be lucky and get another moderate, and thus not real, Republican.
.
60
Breaking News … Arlen Specter is bolting from the Party of Nutters and becoming a Democrat.
Just Add It To the List of Lies
Andrew Sullivan posts this video:
Now the truth:
Bush personally authorized every technique revealed at Abu Ghraib. He refused to act upon the International Committee of the Red Cross’s report that found that he had personally authorized the torture of prisoners, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on Torture and domestic law against cruel and inhuman treatment. A refusal to investigate and prosecute Red Cross allegations of torture is itself a violation of the Geneva Accords.
Morning Joke
Joe Scarborough flaps his lips, and out comes this:
I don’t want to have a debate about the history of the CIA, but I do want to have a debate about what’s happened since September 11, 2001, and I can tell you what’s happened. We’ve figured out a hell of a lot about Al Qaeda, we’ve killed or captured two-thirds — that was, god, three, four years ago — of Al Qaeda terrorists — men that we had no idea who they were, and there’s been no attack here, in the United States. Now, if you want to debate the morality of waterboarding, talking about putting caterpillars in boxes, making people sit down with their arms in the air, we can have that debate, we can have the debate on morality, but by every objectionable standard — uh, objective standard — the intelligence community has succeeded in cracking the code on Al Qaeda, and preventing another attack in the United States of America. That, it seems to me, is without debate. So let’s debate the morality of waterboarding, and caterpillars, and making terrorists sit down, and if it upsets you that a terrorist is forced to sit down and put his hands in the air for a while, okay, we’ll have that debate, and I’m quite comfortable where that debate comes down, between liberals and conservatives.
That’s right, Joe. We make terrorists sit down with their hands in the air, and that makes all the truth they’ve kept bottled up inside come tumbling out.
I should try that at home. Sit on the floor and put my hands in the air. I don’t want to be too reckless, though. I might not be able to control what would happen if I sat on the floor and put my hands in the air.
If the Policy Is a Crime, It Should Be Prosecuted
Under the Bush administration, it was policy to break the law. Under the Obama administration, it is policy to obey the law. But not, according to David Broder, enforce it:
Porter Goss’s Dishonest Attack on Congress
It’s infuriating, but it’s entertaining, to watch the same people who spent the better part of the last eight years using lies, secrecy, deception, political maneuvering, and outright intimidation to run a global torture regime on foreign alleged terrorists, alongside a domestic illegal surveillance program on U.S. citizens, pen op-eds in major media outlets attacking Congress for not doing enough to stop them, now that their lawlessness has been publicly revealed.
Take a Deep Breath, Look Under That Rock
There are a lot of arguments for not investigating the war crimes committed under Pres. Bush, and prosecuting those responsible for the torture regime. Paul Krugman demolishes every one of them:
“Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past.” So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify torture. Some people in the political and media establishments have echoed his position. We need to look forward, not backward, they say. No prosecutions, please; no investigations; we’re just too busy.
And there are indeed immense challenges out there: an economic crisis, a health care crisis, an environmental crisis. Isn’t revisiting the abuses of the last eight years, no matter how bad they were, a luxury we can’t afford?
No, it isn’t, because America is more than a collection of policies. We are, or at least we used to be, a nation of moral ideals. In the past, our government has sometimes done an imperfect job of upholding those ideals. But never before have our leaders so utterly betrayed everything our nation stands for. “This government does not torture people,” declared former President Bush, but it did, and all the world knows it.
And the only way we can regain our moral compass, not just for the sake of our position in the world, but for the sake of our own national conscience, is to investigate how that happened, and, if necessary, to prosecute those responsible.
Read the whole thing.
Michele Bachmann: A Byproduct of Oxygen Deprivation
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t you have to have at least an eighth-grade education to be a member of the House of Representatives?
Torture Did Not Make Us Safer
Apologists for what is euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” who claim that the use of harsh, coercive physical and mental tactics — i.e., torture — induced high-value detainees to give up valuable information, prevented terrorist attacks, and made us safer, are wrong.
They are flat-out wrong.
Now playing at Cognitive Dissonance theater!
Wingnuts are gloating over a story reported by a venerable institution of journalism, the, uh, Hollywood Reporter, which details CHAOS! and PATHOS! at a GE shareholder meeting. What’s the big, uber-important, non-wanktastic/rightwing bukkake-esque issue du jour?! The political bias of GE subsidiary MSNBC.
I don’t recall any complaints from their side about MSNBC’s political bias when they gave Michael Savage a show. What did Savage get fired for..? Oh, I remember!
Savage then asked if Foster was a “sodomite”, to which the caller answered, “Yes.” Savage then said to the caller, “Oh, so you’re one of those sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig; how’s that? Why don’t you see if you can sue me, you pig? You got nothing better to do than to put me down, you piece of garbage? You got nothing to do today? Go eat a sausage, and choke on it. Get trichinosis. Now do we have another nice caller here who’s busy because he didn’t have a nice night in the bathhouse who’s angry at me today? Put another, put another sodomite on….no more calls?…I don’t care about these bums; they mean nothing to me. They’re all sausages.
Ann Coulter’s Mother Died. What a Perfect Opportunity To Attack Liberals!
Trust Ann Coulter to use a column about her own mother who just died as a vehicle to attack liberals.
Continuing Developments in Torture-gate
When the Obama administration released the OLC torture memos last Thursday, both AG Eric Holder and Pres. Obama said that the CIA agents who carried out these abusive interrogations would not be prosecuted, as long as they acted within a good-faith reliance on the guidelines set forth in the memos.
On Sunday, Rahm Emanuel told George Stephanopoulos that the Bush administration officials who devised and authorized the torture described in the memos would not be prosecuted, either.
Then, yesterday, Obama walked that back:
President Obama left the door open Tuesday to creating a bipartisan commission that would investigate the Bush administration’s use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects, and did not rule out action by the Justice Department against those who fashioned the legal rationale for those techniques.
The remarks, in response to questions from reporters in the Oval Office, amounted to a shift for the White House. The president had repeatedly said that the nation should look forward rather than focusing on the past, and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, said Sunday in a television interview that Mr. Obama believed that “those who devised policy” should not be prosecuted.
But under intense pressure from Democrats on Capitol Hill and human rights organizations to investigate, the president suggested Tuesday that he would not stand in the way of a full inquiry into what he has called “a dark and painful chapter” in the nation’s history.
Yes, pressure to investigate is part of it, but there’s also the fact that the decision whether to prosecute and who to prosecute is not Obama’s to make.
Marc Thiessen Knows Diddly-Squat About Torture
Marc Thiessen is a former Bush speechwriter and a denizen of The Corner who now spends most of his time promoting his employers’ use of torture (which he calls “enhanced interrogation techniques”). He participated in yesterday’s Torture Comedy Hour at Fox, and he has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post that is essentially a rehash of arguments from a previous op-ed for why torture prevented another 9/11:
Moral Relativism At Its Best
By now, everyone who is awake has heard about the Jane Harman-AIPAC-wiretapping story, which Jeff Stein of CQ Politics broke this morning.
Brad Porter of Donklephant has a concise and lucid summary of the facts [except that, as smintheus points out in Comments, the conversation caught by the NSA between Harman and the Israeli agent was part of a court-approved surveillance, and it was the Israeli agent who was the focus of that surveillance, not Harman. Thank you to smintheus for those eagle eyes, and shame on me for missing it!]
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