Restore fairness to the judiciary

[struggle4progress]

By Michael S. Greco and Patricia M. Wald
October 30, 2008

... The Bush administration has appointed too many judges with partisan political loyalties who have failed to adequately protect citizens' freedoms. The Supreme Court now has four unabashed conservative justices and a fifth who frequently creates a rightist majority. The next president is likely to appoint three new justices. These appointments will either cement a far-right majority for decades to come or return the Supreme Court to the balanced and independent composition intended by the Constitution.

Equally important, the next president will appoint hundreds of life-tenured judges to the lower federal courts. More than 99.9 percent of the 360,000 federal cases decided each year are resolved in these appellate and trial courts, never reaching the Supreme Court. More than 58 percent of current federal judges were appointed by Republican presidents, over one-third by Bush alone. Ten of the 13 federal appellate courts now have wide majorities of conservative Republican appointees. Balance on the federal courts no longer exists.

Such political imbalance in the judiciary has grave consequences. A recent study of over 20,000 decisions documents that federal court panels consisting solely of Republican appointees consistently struck down government agency decisions that did not adhere to conservative ideology. Thus, when the Environmental Protection Agency issues a regulation requiring cleaner air, or the National Labor Relations Board resolves a dispute in favor of employees, a judicial panel consisting of Republican appointees is more likely to strike it down than a balanced panel of Democratic and Republican appointees.

Decisions by Bush appointees repeatedly have denied Americans freedoms and equal access to justice. In Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber, Bush-appointed Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a 5-to-4 Supreme Court majority, denied workers the right to equal pay for equal work. The court ruled that a woman paid less than a man for doing the same job had only 180 days after her first discriminatory paycheck to file her claim - even if she did not learn until years later that men doing the same work earned more. Republican presidential candidate John McCain has praised the Ledbetter decision as "correct" ...

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/10/30/restore_fairness_to_the_judiciary/

[aquart]

1. To achieve balance, ALL our judge appointments must be extreme liberal.

No pussyfooting with lily-livered centrists.