The death of chief justice Rehnquist and the president's nomination of John Roberts raises the stakes for the court and the American people exponentially.
quote by Ralph Neas
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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A Do-Over Again?
I wrote awhile back about the Michigan and Florida Democratic Do-Over,
Because they violated the Democratic Party’s rules,
Now Barack Obama is the 44th President as of January 20th was that for sure?
In the hustle and bustle amongst all the bling and jewels,
There was a snafu,
At noon, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts who hadn’t clue,
What he was about to say,
Justice Roberts managed to mumble a few pseudo-dyslexic statements,
For President-Elect Obama to repeat, with some surprise,
After all was the Chief Justice caught up in the moments?
This slice of American History;
This Chief Justice will make history for centuries after his demise.
What a glorious event,2 million people attended, without one fracas of the law,
What moments that practically the whole world watched,
Glued to their TV’s, radios, I-Pods, and Computers,
Could have not believed what they saw,
A non-white man was going be the President of the United States of America?
But back to the swearing ceremony; the Chief Justice,
-well kind of ‘screwed up’.
Rather than embarrass the Judge,
Barack played along,
That’s when I knew he was for real,
Rather than create an upheaval of trying to correct the Judge’s words,
Barack went on with the flow,
No ‘up-manship’ here,
it was pretty clear,
That Barack Obama was our president after 12: 01 pm EST,
However he was repeating the words of a man, not the constitution,
Yesterday, at a private ceremony,
Supreme Court Roberts did say the correct words,
In which “President Obama” was sworn in a second time,
On consecutive dates in this institution.
(1-22-09)
poem by Joe Rosochacki
Submitted by Poetry Lover
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It's now up to the full Senate to move swiftly to confirm John Roberts so he can assume his duties and responsibilities as chief justice when the Supreme Court begins its new term in a matter of weeks. We call on the Senate to confirm John Roberts without delay.
quote by Jay Alan Sekulow
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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How Does It Feel To Be Alone?
How does it feel to be alone
with no one round with whom you can
hang out, e-mail and telephone
now silent from your loverman?
How does it feel to get no kicks
from your beloved? Who is left,
for you to mix with, will you nix
your lovelife, loverman bereft?
Stone cold and lonely, lady, will
you roll, or will you gather moss?
On empty running, will you fill
your life again, make up your loss?
I knew that you were bound to fall
when first you fell for me. D’you feel
there’s someone else now you can call
and hope that you can make a deal?
With no direction home, is there,
d’you think, another man who’ll hold
you as I did, and if so, where
d’you think that like a stone he’s rolled?
Inspired by an article in the NYT by Adam Liptak on the use of lyrics by Bob Dylan in the Supreme Court (“The Chief Justice, Dylan and the Disappearing Double Negative, ” June 29,2008) :
The last chief justice liked light opera. The new one cites Bob Dylan. oour pages into his dissent on Monday in an achingly boring dispute between pay phone companies and long distance carriers, John G. Roberts Jr., the chief justice of the United States, put a song lyric where the citation to precedent usually goes. “The absence of any right to the substantive recovery means that respondents cannot benefit from the judgment they seek and thus lack Article III standing, ” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “ ‘When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.’ Bob Dylan, Like a Rolling Stone, on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia Records 1965) .”
Alex B. Long, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and perhaps the nation’s leading authority on the citation of popular music in judicial opinions, said this was almost certainly the first use of a rock lyric to buttress a legal proposition in a Supreme Court decision. “It’s a landmark opinion, ” Professor Long said.
In the lower courts, according to a study Professor Long published in the Washington & Lee Law Review last year, Mr. Dylan is by far the most cited songwriter. He has been quoted in 26 opinions. Paul Simon is next, with 8 (12 if you count those attributed to Simon & Garfunkel) . Bruce Springsteen has 5.
But Mr. Dylan has only once before been cited as an authority on Article III standing, which concerns who can bring a lawsuit in federal court. His key contribution to legal discourse has been in another area.
“The correct rule on the necessity of expert testimony has been summarized by Bob Dylan: ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, ’ ” a California appeals court wrote in 1981, citing “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Eighteen other decisions have cited that lyric.
Chief Justice Roberts’s predecessor, William H. Rehnquist, cited his beloved Gilbert & Sullivan in a 1980 dissent from a decision that the press had a constitutional right of access to court proceedings. He was still an associate justice, and he thought the court had made up the right out of whole cloth. In rebuttal, Justice Rehnquist relied on the Lord Chancellor in “Iolanthe” to rebuke the majority. “The Law is the true embodiment of everything that’s excellent, ” the Lord Chancellor says. “It has no kind of fault or flaw, and I, my Lords, embody the Law.”
That made Justice Rehnquist’s point pretty well. The Roberts citation is more problematic. On the one hand, he showed excellent taste. “Like a Rolling Stone, ” as Greil Marcus has written, is “the greatest record ever made, perhaps, or the greatest record that ever would be made.” On the other hand, Chief Justice Roberts gets the citation wrong, proving that he is neither an originalist nor a strict constructionist. What Mr. Dylan actually sings, of course, is, “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.”
It’s true that many Web sites, including Mr. Dylan’s official one, reproduce the lyric as Chief Justice Roberts does. But a more careful Dylanist might have consulted his iPod. “It was almost certainly the clerks who provided the citation, ” Professor Long said. “I suppose their use of the Internet to check the lyrics violates one of the first rules they learned when they were all on law review: when quoting, always check the quote with the original source, not someone else’s characterization of what the source said.” The larger objection is that the citation is not true to the original point Mr. Dylan was making, which was about the freedom that having nothing conveys and not about who may sue a phone company. (See, e.g., “Me and Bobby McGee.”)
6/29/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Splitting Infinitives
Chief Justice Roberts hates to split
infinitives, and boldly goes
towards the future without wit,
his path as prim as that prim rose
that once Polonius boldly took,
advising Hamlet not to dally.
The Constitution almost shook
when he refused to shilly-shally,
and tried to wander in a way
that was unfaithful to the text
the oath of office. The next day
the problem was resolved, and now,
Queen’s English and our own unregal
language must agree that splitting
of infinitives is legal,
although pedantically unfitting,
since we’ve a President who swore
appropriately, and a Justice
who like Polonius is a bore
and clearly just as dry as dust is.
Inspired by Stephen Pinker’s Op-Ed article in the NYT, January 22,2009, appropriately titled “Oaf of Office, ” commenting on the fiasco created by Chief Justice Roberts when administering the oath of office to President Obama according togrammatical rules that conflict with the original text of the oath:
In 1969, Neil Armstrong appeared to have omitted an indefinite article as he stepped onto the moon and left earthlings puzzled over the difference between “man” and “mankind.” In 1980, Jimmy Carter, accepting his party’s nomination, paid homage to a former vice president he called Hubert Horatio Hornblower. A year later, Diana Spencer reversed the first two names of her betrothed in her wedding vows, and thus, as Prince Charles Philip supposedly later joked, actually married his father. On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes. Instead of having Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, ” Chief Justice Roberts had him “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” When Mr. Obama paused after “execute, ” the chief justice prompted him to continue with “faithfully the office of president of the United States.” (To ensure that the president was properly sworn in, the chief justice re-administered the oath Wednesday evening.)
How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling. Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers. Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs, ” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to, ” or an auxiliary like “will, ” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”
Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.
Though the ungrammaticality of split verbs is an urban legend, it found its way into The Texas Law Review Manual on Style, which is the arbiter of usage for many law review journals. James Lindgren, a critic of the manual, has found that many lawyers have “internalized the bogus rule so that they actually believe that a split verb should be avoided, ” adding, “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers has succeeded so well that many can no longer distinguish alien speech from native speech.” In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict constructionism and unilaterally amended the Constitution by moving the adverb “faithfully” away from the verb. President Obama, whose attention to language is obvious in his speeches and writings, smiled at the chief justice’s hypercorrection, then gamely repeated it. Let’s hope that during the next four years he will always challenge dogma and boldly lead the nation in new directions.
1/22/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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If you could say of any one individual that the court as an institution is the length and shadow of that individual, surely it would be John Marshall.
quote by William Rehnquist
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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There's no question that Roberts will vote like William Rehnquist... If he swings, it will be from right to far right.
quote by Jonathan Turley
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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The irony of the Supreme Court hearing on these cases last week and of the outright hostility that the Court has displayed against religion in recent years is that above the head of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a concrete display of the Ten Commandments.
quote by Cliff Stearns
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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We've got another nominee coming up, well qualified, Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owens has a tremendous reputation, tremendous record, but they are already marshalling their forces to try to stop that nomination.
quote by Jay Alan Sekulow
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I do know there are a lot of people who seem to be in my corner, and that's, of course, wonderful. I'm really more interested in the nomination than in the award, because I think the nomination just puts you within a group of outstanding actors.
quote by Morgan Freeman
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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I yearn to see other chief executives throughout the nation follow suit, so that as a people we may hasten the elimination of barbarism as a tool of American justice.
quote by Winthrop Rockefeller
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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So
The other day on the fifth Anniversary of our invasion of Iraq our Vice President Chaney said so when he was told that 75% of us the American people believe that the war in Iraq is a mistake. So what if we never found weapons of mass destruction. So what if we never know whether Bin Laden is dead or alive. So what if Hussein is dead but nothing really has change. So what if we are now looked at as the terrorist in this so called war on terrorism. So what if we have sent more American to their death then the 9/11 attacks ever did. None of this matter at all says our Vice President. We must stay in Iraq until we win. But there is nothing to win. So!
Remember the picture of the president in the classroom, being told of the attack by chief of staff Andy Card? The American people thought they were seeing a man suddenly thrust into a grave challenge no one could have anticipated.
quote by Howard Fineman
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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What we won when all of our people united ... must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. ... Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.
quote by Lyndon B. Johnson
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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What we won when all of our people united must not be lost in suspicion and distrust and selfishness and politics. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as president.
quote by Lyndon B. Johnson
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Beyond all reasonable doubt For J.T ellison
Can it be that you believe?
that justice is what you receive.
If you submit your case to court.
It ought to be but it is not.
All thought of justice is forgot
bogged down in legal argument.
Though you have right upon your side
Although you know the witness lied
it does not mean you’ll win your case.
You cannot prove his words untrue
so there is little you can do.
and at that point your case will fail.
Justice is blind and can be found
outside the court with her eyes bound.
Because she cannot bear to see.
The happenings inside the court
Injustices of every sort
No justice just a travesty.
13-Jul-08
http: // blpg.myspace.com/poeticpiers
poem by Ivor Or Ivor.e Hogg
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It is always possible for the court to overreach its proper bounds and perhaps declare a lot of laws unconstitutional and frustrate the will of the majority in a way that it ought not be frustrated.
quote by William Rehnquist
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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Estimation
The president estimated the war courage,
But the believers argued plaintively as a heart
Would beat faster after the exercise of the muscles,
The president just calculated according to his taste.
The chief-generals perched nation-wide, safeguarding like birds
Over their chicks in a nest of surrendering whispers,
In order to crush the rebellion a quelling of forces
Had to arrive for the good of the logical city and state.
Justice appealed to the vicious, an act of war on the self,
But the president himself fought bravely in front of the barristers
Of the nation and realm, by negotiating and trivializing the sins
Of the forefathers and ancestors of endearing skill and precision.
The tirade pursued the ends of the earth and soil we fed,
Potatoes were uprooted and crops of other sides left to die;
Dying was the death, and death was to die, the famine
Had been fabricated, after all.
The wars extended, the wars were a realistic space of seduction,
For the enemy also fought bravely, and the president negotiated,
Words were still aggressive like the words of danger and pursuit,
Let the haranguing go on! And forgiveness became an actuality.
poem by Naveed Akram
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Soon after I returned to private practice, former Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger called me one day.
quote by Fred F. Fielding
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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There has been an awful lot of time and money spent looking at the president over the last four years The American people saw through those investigations. They voted for the president. And despite all of this time and attention, nothing has turned up because the president and the first lady did nothing wrong.
quote by George Stephanopoulos
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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President Reagan always gave the credit to the American people and American ideals. He treated his job as a valuable temporary loan from the American people, a loan that should be respected and returned with dutiful appreciation.
quote by William L. Jenkins
Submitted by Lucian Velea
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