Politics Blog

Mike Fisher was the GOP candidate for Pa. Gov. back in 2002. Despite pre-election media “polls” alleging he would lose by 15-20 points, when the ballots (and the Democrat ghost, felon and multiple votes) actually were counted, Fisher put in a decent showing. He took 45% of the vote to “Fast Eddie” Rendell’s 53%.

Before running for governor, Fisher had a long career as a criminal prosecutor and a Republican state legislator, along with a stint as the attorney general of the Keystone State.

Mike Fisher has been a federal appeals court judge for the last two years.

The Senate confirmed Fisher to the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals – on which Sam Alito also happened to sit – back in Dec. 2003. With no opposition. By voice vote.

Of course, that was back when the angry left was screaming and shouting about Bush, Saddam, Iraq, the economy, oil prices, and Gitmo, so perhaps everybody was distracted, no?

Wait a minute.
Waaait a minute.

The angry left *still* is screaming about those things. And nervous and non-voting conservatives *still* are keeping them in business by tuning in and subscribing.

In any event, I decided to surf the Net to see how Judge Fisher was panning out.

* * *

In this case, Judge Fisher threw out a plea by a foreign national to reverse the denial of his request for asylum and to prevent deportation. Meaning the claimant was ordered removed from the country.

Here a panel including Judge Fisher smacked around a crime-bot and dismissed his appeal of an order in which he got hammered on good time credits for his criminal sentence and resulting stay at Club Fed.

In this case, Judge Fisher threw out an appeal by a claimant whose request for SSI and federal disability benefits had been denied.

Here Judge Fisher threw out a claim for breach of contract and so-called “bad faith” against a liability insurance company.

In this case, Judge Fisher upheld the dismissal of a multi-plaintiff lawsuit against a local school district in connection with constitutional claims related to a survey of its students’ lives and experiences. It’s a complicated case with a multitude of issues, several of which revolve around the so-called “constitutional right to privacy.”

Just before having to acknowledge U.S. Supreme Court cases in which rights to privacy have been found (many people including yours truly would say “invented”), Judge Fisher made a comment that speaks at high volumes about one of his core judicial philosphies:

The United States Constitution does not mention an explicit right to privacy and the United States Supreme Court has never proclaimed that such a generalized right exists.

Indeed.

I could go on and on, but I’ll stop right there.

Mike Fisher is 61 years old.

He’s likely to remain on the bench – deporting people, throwing out claims for public-money disability benefits, tossing lawsuits against insurers, beating down crime-bots, and being a solid constructionist on statutory and constitutional issues – for two decades or even more.

– Jayson

Carlos Bea is one of the 40 jurists the Senate GOP has confirmed to the federal appeals courts since President Bush first took office in 2001.

Yeah, forty. Well, actually, there were forty-two confirmed circuit judges. But Michael Chertoff became DHS Secretary and John Roberts was elevated to Chief Justice.

Getting back to Judge Bea, he sits {gulp} on the Ninth Circus and was nominated after serving on the San Francisco Superior Court.

So, he’s one of those Souters about which perma-angry conservatives twitch and fume, right?

Wrong.

In this case, Judge Bea proved his conservative bona fides by dissenting from the majority of the Ninth Circus in connection with a public school racial gerrymandering/forced-integration plan by the City of Seattle.

The money quote from Judge Bea:

Up to now, the American ‘melting pot’ has been made up of people voluntarily coming to this country from different lands, putting aside their differences and embracing our common values. To date it has not meant people who are told whether they are white or non-white, and where to go to school based on their race.

* * *

[T]he majority does not hesitate to endorse the [School] District’s use of the racial tiebreaker. Rather than recognizing the protections of the individual against governmental racial classifications, the majority instead endorses a rigid racial governmental grouping of high school students for the purpose of attaining racial balance in the schools . . . . I do not share the majority’s confidence that such a plan is constitutionally permissible.

* * *

The way to end racial discrimination is to stop discriminating by race.

Indeed.
Amen.

Joining Judge Bea in that anti-”affirmative action”/pro-freedom dissent were Judges Kleinfeld, Tallman and Callahan.

Judge Callahan, like Judge Bea, was nominated by George W. Bush.

Judge Kleinfeld was appointed to the federal bench by Reagan, then elevated to the appeals court by George H.W. Bush.

All six of the jurists who signed onto the pro-race quota majority opinion were nominated to the Ninth Circus either by Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Only Judge Tallman – a post-1994 Clinton appointee – went against the racial gerrymandering position of the Clinton/Carter Cartel.

That’s quite analogous to the sorts of voting patters we see in the U.S. Senate, isn’t it?

Yep.

Six of seven Democrat-appointed judges voted in favor of government-imposed racial quotas.

Whereas three of the four GOP-appointed judges (Judge Kozinski wrote separately, concurring in the majority’s result but not its reasoning) vehemently were against that concept.

6/7 = Democrat judges in favor of gummint racial quotas.
4/4 = GOP judges against gummint racism.
3/4 - GOP judges willing to strike down Seattle’s public school racial quota system.

Go figure.

— Jayson

More evidence that Judge Alito is my kind of judge:

Late on an October night in 1974, Memphis, Tenn., police officer Elton Hymon responded to a call about a break in. At the scene,a neighbor said she’d heard glass shattering and pointed to the house next door. Hymon went behind it. He heard a door slam. Someone ran into the yard and stopped at a 6-foot-high chain-link fence at the yard’s edge. Hymon shined his flashlight at the person and saw a teenager who he could tell was unarmed. Hymon called, “Police, halt.” The teen started climbing the fence. Hymon shot him in the back of the head, fatally. Edward Garner was a 15-year-old black eighth grader. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed about 110 pounds. A purse and $10 were found on his body.

After Edward Garner’s death, his father sued, arguing that his son’s civil rights had been violated. The 6th Circuit, one of the federal courts of appeal, agreed, ruling that Garner’s shooting violated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable seizures. In the process, the court struck down a Tennessee statute based on an 18th-century common-law “fleeing felon” rule, which allowed police to use deadly force against a felony suspect who was trying to elude arrest. In the Garner case, the 6th Circuit said that before shooting a suspect, a police offer must have probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a danger.

…

In 1984, the Memphis Police Department and the state of Tennessee appealed the 6th Circuit’s decision to the Supreme Court. Samuel Alito, then a lawyer in the Solicitor General’s office, was assigned to help decide whether the Reagan administration should take sides. “I believe that the decision below is wrong,” Alito wrote in a cover note, referring to the 6th Circuit’s ruling

…

“Was the shooting reasonable?” Alito asked. His answer was yes. “Many of the facts recited by the court of appeals”—like Garner’s youth and minor crime—”seem essentially irrelevant.” To Alito, the case came down to this: If Officer Hymon shot, “there was the chance that he would kill a person guilty only of a simple breaking and entering; that is essentially what occurred. If he didn’t shoot, there was a chance that a murderer or rapist would escape and possibly strike again.”

— PoliPundit

There are some truly serious issues Congress could choose to tackle. This is not one of them. (Link via Steve Schippert)

— Lorie Byrd

Republicans in the Middle Atlantic states have been plagued by their own actions. Take for example the recent call by NY Senate majority leader Joe Bruno for Jeanine Pirro to drop her campaign for the NY Senate seat held by Hillary Clinton. While we think Jeanine, once she had the full backing of the NY Republican and Conservative parties, could have mounted a solid but long shot campaign against Hillary, Joe Bruno publicly pulling the carpet from her clearly did more damage to her campaign. But why did he do it? Local political party power in NY? Probably. The long standing division between the D’Amato / Pataki wing and those in the Bruno camp has not been resolved for the good of NY Republicans.

What needs to happen in New York is for the few Republicans of stature to make some hard decisions for the good of the party in the state and across the country. These hard decisions should have been made before Bruno went public. Chillary certainly will have an uncontested or light weight campaign now that Pirro has been totally marginalized. In fact Pirro running for Attorney General is in question since it would appear she does the bidding of the party bosses. Not an image for an Attorney General. Good work Bruno! Your power in NY and power play on Pataki was more important than showing a united Republican party.

The hard decisions are as follows: Ed Cox, President Nixon’s son-in-law, will probably be the US Senate candidate against Hillary. He has not run for any political office. The question will be whether he can be a strong challenger to Hillary or just a token candidate. While Bruno wants Mike Bloomberg to run for Governor, Bloomberg should stay right where he is, NYC mayor, where he will do the most good to regain Republican leadership in NY state. He can run for Governor in 2010 or Schumer’s Senate seat later.

And what else needs to happen is for all Republican leaders in NY to get together, recruit, and endorse strong candidates that can win or at least run strong campaigns in this heavily Democrat voting state. And, yes, you must strongly support these candidates whether you like them or not. If you do not, then shut up and let the voters do it in a primary, after all that is what primary elections are for. And, yes, if the candidate wins the primary, then support that candidate, after all that is what winning in November is about.

— Alexander K. McClure

Contrary to the often-hysterical fears of conservatives, the far left does not control the judiciary.

Not even close.

In fact, they lose far more cases than those in which they prevail.

It’s just that the national media underplays or occasionally even censors the left’s judicial defeats, while running their victories up flag poles in the hope that Joe and Jane Casual Voter will salute. And many conservatives allow the liberal media to set their daily moods; sometimes even to affect their decisions whether to participate in the electoral processes.

Not even Clinton’s appointees snort the leftist lines in all instances.

Not by a long shot.

In fact, a huge percentage of Clinton’s post-1994 appointees either are Zell Miller-style Democrats or Giuliani/Cohen-style Republicans.

Case in point:

A US federal judge ruled that random bag searches on the New York subway were constitutional, dismissing a lawsuit brought against the city by a civil rights group.

In his ruling, District Judge Richard Berman concluded that the invasion of privacy inherent in the searches was justified by the importance of preventing a terrorist attack.

The New York Civil Liberties Union, which had sought to end the searches on the grounds that they violated the constitutional rights of passengers and were ineffective, said it would appeal the ruling.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg welcomed the judge’s decision.

(Emphasis added.)

* * *

FYI: President Bush has nominated and the Senate has confirmed over 150 federal trial court judges, in addition to 40 or so appeals court judges. Now, they’re not all as far right as Scalia or Thomas. But they’re certainly not to the left of Clinton appointee and bane of the NYCLU’s existence, Richard Berman.

And Prez Bush still has three years remaining within which he can stack the federal courts.

— Jayson

in Miami:

“ICE Deports Former Ecuadorian Customs Director Convicted by Ecuadorian Government for Embezzling $ 1 Million U.S.Dollars“

Read the whole thing.

— Jayson

— Jayson

Here are excerpts from a press release that will not be covered in too many corners of the press or the Internet:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) special agents yesterday carried out two separate enforcement actions resulting in the arrest of 42 aliens who were illegally working at a military base in New Mexico and at the International Airport in Louisiana.

* * *

The Louisiana arrests were part of an ongoing local operation that has netted 50 illegal aliens in recent months. Five of the six criminal aliens in custody from the previous arrests are now being prosecuted . . . on charges of re-entry after deportation and document fraud; the sixth criminal alien is being prosecuted . . . on charges of false claims of U.S. citizenship. Of those arrested yesterday, all are in ICE custody and have been placed in removal proceedings.

‘Those businesses who knowingly hire illegal aliens and allow them to be placed in areas critically important to this country will face significant criminal and administrative charges,’ said Michael A. Holt, special agent-in-charge for the ICE New Orleans office . . . .

There’s more.

Much more.

Read the whole thing.

— Jayson

While acid-dropping leftists on campus and in the media have been ranting and raving about this, that, or the other thing, Prez Bush and the GOP caucus in the U.S. Senate have been stacking various federal appeals courts with so many conservatives they’ll be issuing anti-leftist rulings 20-30 years after the Dean/Kos blocs finally graduate.

One of those courts is the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals – on which the Prez/Senate have placed seven jurists.

Two of those judges are Jeffrey Sutton and John Rogers.

Judge Sutton once clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. He then represented the State of Ohio as a state solicitor.

Judge Rogers spent 30 years in the U.S. Army Reserves. He made his legal bones working in Prez Ford’s Department of Justice.

The Senate confirmed Rogers in November 2002. Yeah, right after the MediaCrats got Foleyed in those mid-terms. Sutton was confirmed in April 2003.

In this case, Judge Rogers found that strip searches conducted of high school students were unconstitutional, but that because case law at the time they were undertaken was not cut-and-dried on that point the school districts were immune from liability. Judge Sutton reversed the denial of the school district’s summary judgment motion and ordered that summary judgment to be granted [Ed. note: practicing civil litigators reading this will know just how rarely *that* happens; once in a blue moon].

Here Judge Rogers threw out a claim that challenged a federal Bureau of Prisons’ policy change regarding the custody dispositions of incarcerated crime-bots.

In this case, Judge Sutton addressed claims made against a local school district based upon its adoption of a dress code for middle school students.

The money quote:

It is not lost on us that, in the eyes of a 12 year-old, ‘look[ing] nice’ and ‘feel[ing] good’ about the clothing one wears are important and, rightly or wrongly, may be enough to make or break a kid’s day. Style and taste in clothing, it also is true, may be one of the first ways in which children learn to express their individuality and engage in self-expression. And, as every parent knows (or will soon learn), it is often through choices in clothing that children first learn how to challenge authority, though usually authority in the form of their parents, not their school (which perhaps is the reason why parents urge schools to adopt dress codes in the first place).

Even so, the First Amendment does not protect such vague and attenuated notions of expression – namely, self-expression through any and all clothing that a 12 year-old may wish to wear on a given day.

* * *

To rule otherwise not only would erase the requirement that expressive conduct have an identifiable message but also would risk depreciating the First Amendment in cases in which a ‘particularized message’ does exist.

Indeed.

Neither Judge Sutton nor Judge Rogers are bleeding heart “librulz,” that’s quite clear.

Judge Sutton is 45 years old. Judge Rogers is 57.

They’ll be issuing rulings along those lines for decades, Chomsky.

Decades.

— Jayson