Luttig, Padilla, and Impeachment

Well, I guess we can assume that Michael Luttig won't be getting nominated to any future SCOTUS openings:

WASHINGTON (AP) ? In a sharp rebuke, a federal appeals court denied Wednesday a Bush administration request to transfer terrorism suspect Jose Padilla from military to civilian law enforcement custody.

The three-judge panel of the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also refused the administration's request to vacate a September ruling that gave President Bush wide authority to detain "enemy combatants" indefinitely without charges on U.S. soil.

The decision, written by Judge Michael Luttig, questioned why the administration used one set of facts before the court for 3 1/2 years to justify holding Padilla without charges but used another set to convince a grand jury in Florida to indict him last month.

Luttig said the administration has risked its "credibility before the courts" by appearing to use the indictment of Padilla to thwart an appeal of the appeals court's decision that gave the president wide berth in holding enemy combatants.

Padilla, a former Chicago gang member, was arrested in 2002 at Chicago's O'Hare Airport as he returned to the United States from Afghanistan. Justice and Defense Department officials alleged Padilla had come home to carry out an al-Qaida backed plot to blow up apartment buildings in New York, Washington or Florida.

By the way---and I don't say this sort of thing lightly---George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales and all other relevant monarchists should be impeached for deliberately and repeatedly violating federal law as a matter of statute. They did this because, Gonzales says, they wouldn't have been able to convince Congress to change the law.

Got that? Break the law because you want to do something you're certain Congress won't make legal. Doesn't get any more flagrant then that.

I know no one lied about sex, but surely this offense is as impeachable as they come.

Not quite the eve of the hearings, but....

A friend in the MSM sends along the text of an email from Senator Schumer's office. The top part is a retort to a release from the office of Senator Cornyn (Rubber Stamp-TX), which is provided at the bottom:

A RETORT FROM THE OFFICE OF SENATOR SCHUMER:

'Twas a month after Miers, when all through the land,
Went a plague of amnesia 'bout how she was canned.

Now, Cornyn! Now, Sessions! Now Kyl and Frist!
Not one had some recall of how she was dissed.

They blathered and brayed about up-or-down votes,
They acted dismayed and gave virulent quotes.

They forgot how their own was battered and fried,
How an up-or-down vote on her was denied.

With her conservative views not patently clear,
They allowed a campaign of cynical smear.

On Alito, they say, he deserves confirmation,
But don't wait for the hearings, just accept coronation.

Don't ask if his views on the law are too cramped,
This substitute nom must be rubber-stamped.

So "advice and consent" gets thrown out the door,
When there's peace to be made with the right wing's hard core.


SENATOR CORNYN'S OFFICE PUT THIS OUT:

'Twas one month before the hearings, and all through the city
Not many Democrats were waiting, not even some on the Committee

The hard left was already distorting his rulings
Why wait for the hearings if you oppose all the President's doings?

Some Senators asked for privileged documents, no exception
So much for the "so-called" right to privacy protection

From strip searches to abortion, "he's an extremist!" they wailed
But we've heard it before-against Judge Roberts, it failed.

Of course the attacks will not turn the public
"Confirm him" they say, we want independent courts in our republic!

I have to say, the Cornyn thing is some of the worst poetry I've ever read. You'd think these guys never heard of meter (or maybe they just think it's a French term).

32.3% Full or 67.6% Empty?

I just found out that my "Author Rank" at the SSRN is 17568 out of 54364. I don't know whether to feel happy, sad or indifferent about this news.

For Shame: Clinton Edition

It seems Sen. Hillary Clinton (Party of Unprincipled Pandering - NY) is supporting (actually, co-sponsoring) legislation to ban flag-burning.

Given that the SCOTUS ruled in 1989 that a previous flag-burning statute was unconstitutional, it seems like this is just pure grandstanding on her part. But it does show you that Sen. Clinton can be just like President Clinton: why take a stand on principle when selling out might gain a couple points in the polls?

I expect this sort of garbage from (most) elected Republicans. It's a shame when Democrats join the illiberal party. I didn't expect to support Hillary in the primaries, but this pretty much seals it for me.

Gotta Love Those Freedom-Promoting Righties

Here's an excerpt from one of yesterday's NewsMax stories:

Michael Reagan, son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is blasting Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean for declaring that the U.S. won't be able to win the war in Iraq, saying Dean ought to be "hung [sic] for treason."

"Howard Dean should be arrested and hung [sic] for treason or put in a hole until the end of the Iraq war!" Reagan told his Radio America audience on Monday.

Reagan was reacting to Dean's comments earlier in the day, when the top Democrat said that the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong."

Gosh, and I thought the now-that-we-can't-find-any-WMDs storyline for justifying the Iraq war was to bring democracy and freedom to the middle east. I didn't realize that torture and hangings for political disagreement were part of that equation.

Estimating the Cost of the Iraq War

My friend Scott Wallsten over at AEI-Brookings has put together a website where you can estimate the present discounted value of Iraq war costs under alternative assumptions about various components (e.g., number of troops killed or injured, and date the US leaves Iraq).

In a nutshell, it seems Larry Lindsey was wrong about the costs of a US-led war in Iraq --- he way underestimated them.

This is a follow-up on a recent paper Scott wrote with Katrina Kosec (about which I posted a while ago).

GO BIG BLUE!

Well, it may not have been pretty, but Giants 17, Dallas 10 is what counts.

Here's a nice memento:



Don't tell the President about this picture, though, or he might suck up to James Dobson and try and amend the U.S. Constitution.....

Bias

Text of a letter I wrote to the NYT yesterday. No love from the Times, but CCM's editor/publisher has kindly agreed to give me a voice:

Last week Bernard Goldberg took the Times to task for publishing a sequence of pictures of President Bush depicting his inability to exit a room. Mr. Goldberg wrote that "this is precisely what gives your critics ammunition".

At the time I read Mr. Goldberg's letter, I wondered if he feels similarly bothered every time the Times prints a photo of Mr. Bush in front of one of those White House-created banners Mr. Bush uses.

Today we have means to test Mr. Goldberg's own unbiasedness: the Times ran a gigantic color picture of Mr. Bush with the equally gigantic words "Plan for Victory" made deliberately visible (indeed, the camera angle obscures the President to include the words). As Mr. Goldberg wrote, the Times could have run this picture "say, on Page B27".

To quote Mr. Goldberg again: "But on Page 1, whatever your editors' intentions, it sure looks like an editorial posing as news."

I hope you'll run Mr. Goldberg's second letter of complaint -- should it materialize.

Sincerely,

Dr. Jonah B. Gelbach
Washington, DC
Professor of Economics
University of Maryland

Oh, That Old Thing? Alito Ducks.

Gotta love this dodge by Alito, from his Senate questionnaire. The questionnaire asks him to

List all professional, business, fraternal, scholarly, civic, charitable, or other organizations, other than those listed in response to Questions 10 or 11, to which you belong, or to which you have belonged, or in which you have participated since graduation from law school.

By now just about everyone knows about Alito's membership in the group Concerned Alumni of Princeton -- a nice bunch of folks who were really "concerned" about the admission of women to Princeton; the large number of racial minorities on campus, compared to legacy students; and promoting birth control, among other bugaboos of the latter part of the 20th Century. Alito trumpted this membership in his bid to become a political appointee in the Reagan DOJ.

But apparently now he has no direct memory of this time of youthful indiscretions (as the elderly Henry Hyde once referred to his conduct of an extra-martial affair at the tender age of 46):

Concerned Alumni of Princeton: This was a group of Princeton alumni. A document I recently reviewed reflects that I was a member of the group in the 1980s. Apart from that document, I have no recollection of being a member, of attending meetings, or otherwise participating in the activities of the group. The group has no current officers from whom more information may be obtained.

Yeah. And Clarence Thomas had never ever thought seriously about Roe v Wade before he testified to the SJC.

I can't say it any better than Marty Lederman already has:

This seems very hard to believe. From everything I've heard, however, Judge Alito is an honest and straight-shooting fellow; so I'm willing to assume that his CAP membership and participation were so fleeting, so negligible, in the 1980s that he truly does not recall them now, 20 years later. But, if that's indeed the case, what does that say about his citation of his CAP membership on his OLC application back in 1985, in order to demonstrate how died-in-the-wool conservative he was? The whole incident is very odd.

P.S. Just to be clear: I'm not suggesting that being fond of the early-60's National Review as a teenager should disqualify someone for a Supreme Court seat forty years later. But going out of one's way in the mid-80s to emphasize how one's philosophy was formed by that youthful dalliance with such a periodical? And doing so in order to demonstrate one's fitness for an high-level OLC post? Well, that's something else entirely . . .

Honestly, I thought that conservatives (you know, the folks who proudly supported groups like the CAP back in the 80s, when it wasn't so cool) wanted a nominee who would deliver an honest, proud, chest-out kind of debate on their jurisprudential views. I was kind of looking forward to that debate.

But it looks like Alito's just going to try to duck when faced with his record, of which he was once so proud.