Want to impeach someone? Here's a target.
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Categories: Civil Liberties / Privacy, Peace & Social Justice, Foreign Policy & Security, Effective & Ethical Government, Separation of Powers / Federalism, Crime & Penal Reform, Budget Priorities
Categories: Civil Liberties / Privacy, Peace & Social Justice, Foreign Policy & Security, Effective & Ethical Government, Separation of Powers / Federalism, Crime & Penal Reform, Budget Priorities
I got this background from David Bromwich over at Huffington Post. This is the judge that dismissed the Valerie Plame suit against Cheney.
The federal judiciary is thickly planted now with judges who can be relied on for opinions that cooperate with the claims of arbitrary power. A staff lawyer for Kenneth Starr from 1995 through mid-1997, John D. Bates was appointed to the U.S. District Court by President G.W. Bush in December 2001. In December 2002, he dismissed the GAO lawsuit in Walker v. Cheney, which had sought information about the vice president's secret dealings on energy policy. The warrant for dismissal, in that case, turned on a failure to demonstrate "injury." Of course, oversight agencies perform their work in order to discover injuries; they can hardly name in advance and with perfect precision the injuries they seek to discover. But such are the arguments by which a political judge may give his decisions an appearance of standing above politics. In February 2006, after the resignation from the FISA court of James Robertson -- an unusual act of protest against the circumvention of FISA by unauthorized government wiretaps -- Judge Bates was picked by the new Chief Justice, John Roberts, to sit as the newest judge on the FISA court.
The federal judiciary is thickly planted now with judges who can be relied on for opinions that cooperate with the claims of arbitrary power. A staff lawyer for Kenneth Starr from 1995 through mid-1997, John D. Bates was appointed to the U.S. District Court by President G.W. Bush in December 2001. In December 2002, he dismissed the GAO lawsuit in Walker v. Cheney, which had sought information about the vice president's secret dealings on energy policy. The warrant for dismissal, in that case, turned on a failure to demonstrate "injury." Of course, oversight agencies perform their work in order to discover injuries; they can hardly name in advance and with perfect precision the injuries they seek to discover. But such are the arguments by which a political judge may give his decisions an appearance of standing above politics. In February 2006, after the resignation from the FISA court of James Robertson -- an unusual act of protest against the circumvention of FISA by unauthorized government wiretaps -- Judge Bates was picked by the new Chief Justice, John Roberts, to sit as the newest judge on the FISA court.
I think most voters by now are beginning to see that our current crop of Democrats in Washington are most concerned with trying to coast into larger majorities and the presidency in 2008 without actually fighting effectively to Stop The Iraq War Now and right the NeoCon wrongs by Impeachment.
To keep the bare majorities they now have they must convince the voters they are dramatically different than Bush Republicans and that they can be relied upon to do what the voters want.
So far their actions are mostly sound, fury and little substance. Show us the meat.
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