firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2013 … media?lite
Got this one off NBCNews.com, so I don’t want to hear any Fuxnews bitching, its also by a US Supreme Court Justice.
Dammmmnnnnnn… he said it better than I have on this forum.
CNNBC is the exact same as Fox News.
Lets put a nail in the coffin regarding this thought that any corporate news source is any better than the other. They are all the exact same.
They would have to be.
The left/right paradigm is over.
With respect to economic and foreign policy, true. But there are any number of “social issues” where left and right still mean something. To some folks, anyway.
The fact that Thomas eschews politics goes a long way towards explaining why he’s so lousy at his job.
And he didn’t “blast” anyone in that interview, Contra Nietzsche - you just added your own layer of bogus sensationalism to what is basically a non-story.
He says the only way a black would be president is if that black was one approved by the elites and media.
But…is that really saying much?
I mean, can’t you just replace ‘black’ with ‘person’ and it will still hold true?
The only way a person would be president is if that person was one approved by the elites and media.
I don’t see why that statement is true for black people, but not anybody else.
Seems equally applicable to white people…no?
And good on him for eschewing politics. I actually think that’s quite noble of him.
Yea, it does not matter what color you are, if they want you in you are in and if they want you out, they are brutal.
A SCJ should dislike politics, . They are supposed to be unbiased, unbigoted and it would be nice if they were nonreligious as well.
The supreme court is a political institution sworn to uphold and defend a political document. A vast number of the issues it considers are political issues. For a justice to not be interested in politics is like a baseball coach that isn’t interested in baseball.
It’s more like a batting coach for baseball who’s not interested in the ins and outs of baseball team management.
i don’t agree. A justice’s job is to weigh the pros and cons of the issues they are presented with. If the issues presented are political ones, then the arguments they are presented with (and charged with evaluating) will be political in nature.
Can you give me an actual example that happened, in which a Supreme Court Justice would have benefited by not being as apolitical as Thomas claims to be?
It’s also possible that you’re interpreting the statement ‘I don’t like politics’ differently from how he meant it.
He didn’t blast anything. He didn’t even say much controversial. Basically he was saying that the media will tear apart people they do not like. If you are running for president and you are torn apart, then you have a problem. And White presidential candidates would have this problem. Perhaps CN can show how the Justice is saying that the Elite Media Control via race or what CN Thinks this means in this context. If anything it might mean that black candidates have more of a gauntlet to run.
And hey, I dislike Obama as much as I did Bush.
Yeah, i thought about this and you may be right. i’m guessing he basically said it because he doesn’t want to publically disagree with a sitting president if he doesn’t have to, which is in keeping with how justices are expected to conduct themselves off the bench during interviews and such.
i just find it difficult to imagine how someone could work in the field of constitutional law and at the same time disavow interest in politics. It’s one thing to be neutral with regards to who gets elected to this or that seat, but to rule for or against an issue like Obamacare or Gay Marriage (2 recent examples) seems to me impossible without serious consideration of the politics of the issue.
If, in that last sentence, by ‘politics’ you mean ‘consequences’, then I agree, but I would say that one can be highly aware of, and interested in, the consequences of particular policies without being interested in politics. Maybe ‘politics’ is another nebulous word that means lots of things.
I said what I said and it’s how it is.
I don’t see Kriswest how being a atheist makes them better… I couldn’t care less if we like say, had a Supreme Court justice of some off the wall religion no one ever heard of before being in the court system. There is alot of variation to how we approach seperation of church and state, some pretend like religion doesn’t exist… but the Supreme Court already ruled against that, pointing out Atheism is a religious belief. We have districts like San Francisco that have religious Icons on government property- giant crosses and Hindu/Bhuddist statues. If you have equal access to variation it’s not the end of the world.
Take a hypothetical… Lets say in 100 years we took in a Indian State as a American State, and their coins and state motto said ‘In Kali We Trust’ just like how ours said ‘In God We Trust’. Do you think the Supreme Court will rule no, you might have this tradition but you now gotta accept the abrahamic tradition?
No… and Im betting any WASP judge on the Supreme Court would uphold that, be they religious or not.
It’s not bad for a Supreme Court justice to show that they are religious. It’s bad and unnerving to show they are politically partisan. They set and reset precedent for centuries, its why we pay so much attention to them in our common law system, why we advertise their decisions so broadly. So everyone can digest them. We don’t want them otherwise to be mental eunuchs devoid of intelligence and humanity.
I personally want the most erudite, well published judge scholars to be Supreme Court justices. Just like how I want our senators to be masters of History, able to lecture out of the blue on any point in history, like Senator Byrd could before his jaw fell off. He died old.
I said it wrong, Unbiased about religion is what I should have said. I do not think religious beliefs should have sway with justice. Their church should not be a part of their court but, I know that won’t happen. We need to remove religion from law except to protect religious freedom. I am not against religion, I support it even though I am considered an Atheist.
This is entirely true if you believe there's no objective reality, everything is inherently political, and the society is nothing more than class struggle. By all accounts, Jst Thomas believes none of these things. He presumably thinks his job is to interpret dry legal documents by applying a professional understanding of history and the English language. He doesn't take himself to be making shit up based on personally-derived aims driven by his political activism. There's a fundamental difference between how the left and right DO law, in other words.
Where I went to University, there’s an aggressive campaign to ensure that anybody who comes out of college with those qualifications is a strident, partisan leftist. That’s just another consequence of the expressed view here that legal scholars NEED to be politically active.
So long as we don’t mix up what we mean when we say left and right. Liberal v conservative social and economic differences don’t exactly parallel the liberal v conservative distinction we use when we talk about methods of interpretation.