Good Morning from OYIT [Supreme Court edition]

By Glenn

Good morning! If you're like me, you follow the Supreme Court like it's your old girlfriend from high school. But instead of sleeping in its bed while the Supreme Court is on vacation, we can follow it using the news. I'm getting ahead of myself, though. I hope you've enjoyed the Good Mornings from this week. Maddie has written two, which have really challenged a lot of my previously held views. For example I thought Bob Dylan was dead before I read her Good Morning [Bob Dylan Edition]. I still think he's dead, but I'm really excited to hear this new posthumous album.

[I know he's not dead. Don't send me hate mail Dylan fans, or if you do send it to the mailbag.]


Today's Weather

It's been very rainy here the past few days and will only continue if -- SPOILER ALERT -- more water evaporates into clouds. I rode my bike home the other night in the pouring rain and then also walked around in the barely sprinkling rain yesterday. The funny thing about rain is that no matter how much you dread being stuck in it it's never as bad as you fear. I did however ride my bike to college campus on the sidewalk several years ago when a car drove by and splashed what was the equivalent of a water-based atomic bomb on me. I was soaked with dirty street water. Though a traumatic experience, this was was eventually ruled legal in Glenn v. Rain Car (2007). And I respect the Supreme Court's final decision.


Today's Retirement
David Souter is retiring from the Supreme Court.

Justice Souter, who was appointed in 1990 by a Republican president, the first George Bush, but became one of the most reliable members of the court’s liberal wing, has grown increasingly sour on Washington and intends to return to his home state, New Hampshire, according to the people briefed on his plans.

To summarize the layout of the court right now, there are four lunatic right-wing justices, four traditional liberals and then a center right, yet reasonable, Anthony Kennedy who essentially decides the fate of the free world based on his own whims. President Obama will get to appoint Souter's replacement, so the fundamental nature of the Court will not change even as its average height does.


Today's Worst Supreme Court Decision of Our Young Lives
I will not include such travesties as the Dred Scott decision because very few of our readers were alive when that occurred. I will instead take us back to the year 2000 when instead of our entire society crumbling because of Y2K our entire society crumbled in the aftermath of Bush v Gore. This decision put effectively put George Bush in the White House, Al Gore in a beard and fat growing laboratory, and made clear why FDR had tried to pack the Court sixty years earlier. This was a decision so silly, so rankly political and so poorly justified that they explicitly stated that this precedent dare not apply to future cases of a similar nature.

Today's Best Supreme Court Decision of More Recent Times
There have actually been some damn good decisions (mostly before reasonable Sandra Day O'Connor was replaced with reactionary Samuel Alito) during the Bush presidency. I'm sure you all remember Yaser Hamdi:

Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, 542 U.S. 507 (2004) was a U.S. Supreme Court decision reversing the dismissal of a habeas corpus petition brought on behalf of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen being detained indefinitely as an "illegal enemy combatant".

Other decisions, such as Rasul v Bush or HamDAN vs. Rumsfeld were also good in their attempt to limit executive power but I picked Hamdi because it was the first, coming in June 2004. The Court, in this 8-1 decision, ruled that US citizens have a right to contest their imprisonment. Radical huh? To be fair, Hamdi was picked up in Afghanistan during the theatre of war, unlike convicted Jose Padilla or Ali al-Marri who were arrested in the United States as a citizen and permanent resident, respectively. We don't disappear people in the United States of America! What is funniest to me about this decision is the idea of Clarence Thomas dissenting. Looking at all the evidence and hearing both sides, he sits down at his typewriter and decides the US Government can do whatever the fuck it wants to anyone. What a jerk!


Today's Prediction
It's so hard to predict what might happen next in the weather or on the Supreme Court. The three good decisions I mentioned above all happened before the Court became what it is today, so we will probably have even more rotten decisions with the arch conservative block aligning to cast votes against freedom and for tyranny. I predict Obama will appoint former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich to replace Souter, because they're both from Illinois, like me. I think the weather will continue to be off and on rainy for the next week. I wish I had some sort of pun or analogy to use in conjunction with that, but I used all of my rhetorical devices earlier.