Democrats grow a small vertebra ... by 1kiki

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Democrats grow a small vertebra ...

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Monday, April 3, 2017 18:56
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Monday, April 3, 2017 3:10 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

... though it's too early yet to call it a spine.

Top News
Democrats Gain Enough Votes for a Filibuster on Gorsuch

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER 1:38 PM ET

Senate Democrats appeared to secure the votes necessary to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Neil M. Gorsuch.

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Monday, April 3, 2017 4:00 PM

6STRINGJOKER

What's the reason for not wanting him in, other than it's not a Democrat? I'm seriously asking. I don't know much about the guy.

From abcnews: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/judge-neil-gorsuch-scotus-nominee/story
?id=45008516

Quote:
In the Hobby Lobby case, Gorsuch wrote, "The ACA's mandate requires them to violate their religious faith by forcing them to lend an impermissible degree of assistance to conduct their religion teaches to be gravely wrong."

When it comes to criminal procedure, he dissented in the United States v. Carlos case, arguing that police officers violated the Fourth Amendment when they entered a home that had a "no trespassing" sign posted.

Mark Lucas, the executive director of Concerned Veterans for America, which is backed by Charles Koch and David Koch, said of Gorsuch in a statement, "His concern for the least fortunate is evidenced by his countless opinions against things like overregulation and overcriminalization."

Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley told ABC News that Gorsuch is a "very intelligent person" who would not be that different from Scalia.

Gorsuch has a "coherent and consistent view of the Constitution," Turley said.

Nothing in that article sounded bad, and I didn't even detect the usual apparent left wing bias that you see in almost every MSM article outside of Fox news.

I'm not going out on any limb for the guy. I'm just asking what opponents don't like about him.

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Monday, April 3, 2017 4:14 PM

DREAMTROVE

He's pretty conservative, but that by itself wouldn't do it. It's because of Trump, because Russia.

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Monday, April 3, 2017 5:30 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

This gives a fair summary of both the ruling in question and the hearing:

http://www.salon.com/2017/03/22/al-frankens-grilling-of-gorsuch-expose
s-the-heartless-cruelty-behind-conservative-legal-philosophy/

Franken’s (Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn) questioning concerned the notorious “frozen trucker” case, TransAm Trucking v. Dept. of Labor. Other senators had mentioned it, but never quite in the way that Franken did. A trucker named Alphonse Maddin was fired for making a commonsense decision to save his own life — and to protect others as well. Gorsuch, alone among all the judges who ruled on the case, thought that was perfectly fine. Indeed, he felt it was the only legal conclusion he could possibly reach, a conclusion Franken called “absurd.”

The acts of the matter were perfectly straightforward. As summarized by the court, “In January 2009, Maddin was transporting cargo through Illinois when the brakes on his trailer froze because of subzero temperatures. After reporting the problem to TransAm and waiting several hours for a repair truck to arrive, Maddin unhitched his truck from the trailer and drove away, leaving the trailer unattended. He was terminated for abandoning the trailer.”

Maddin successfully sued for reinstatement, the court explained, under a provision that “makes it unlawful for an employer to discharge an employee who ‘refuses to operate a vehicle because . . . the employee has a reasonable apprehension of serious injury to the employee or the public because of the vehicle’s hazardous safety or security condition.’”

Throughout the proceedings, Gorsuch was the only judge at any level who thought Maddin should have risked death or been fired. That’s what Franken honed in on, dramatizing Maddin’s plight, going through it step by step. After Maddin made a stop at about 11 p.m. on the night in question, he noticed his brakes had frozen. He called for repairs. Franken took it from there.

The dispatcher says wait, hang on there. OK, couple hours goes by, the heater is not working in his cab, it’s 14 below zero, . . . 14 below zero. He calls in and says, ‘My feet, I can’t feel my feet. I can’t feel my feet, my torso, I’m beginning not to be able to feel my torso,’ and they say, ‘Hang on, hang on, wait for us.’ OK, now he actually falls asleep, and at 1:18 a.m., his cousin I think calls . . . and wakes him up, and his cousin says that he is slurring his speech. . . . Now, the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota says that is hypothermia, and if you fall asleep in 14-below-zero weather you can freeze to death. You can die.

He calls them back, he calls them back and his supervisor says, ‘Wait. You gotta wait.’ So he has a couple choices here, wait or take the trailer out, with frozen brakes, onto the interstate.

Doing that, Franken observed, would have put others’ lives at risk as well as Maddin’s own, since without reliable brakes he could only drive 10 to 15 miles per hour. “So what’s that like on an interstate?” Franken asked Gorsuch. “Someone’s going 75 miles an hour, they come over a hill, and slam into that trailer.”

Then there was Maddin’s hypothermia to consider. “He’s a little woozy. . . . I don’t think you’d want to be on the road with him, would you, Judge?” Franken asked. Gorsuch stuttered but did not reply.

“You would? Or not?” Franken pressed. “It’s really easy: Yes or no, would you like to be on the road with him?”

After a bit more back and forth, Gorsuch finally admitted the obvious: “I don’t think I would.”

Franken then wound up his recounting of the case. “He gets fired. And the rest of the judges all go, ‘That’s ridiculous; you can’t fire a guy for doing that.’ There were two safety issues here, . . . the possibility of freezing to death or driving with that rig in a very dangerous way.”

Then Franken asked Gorsuch another simple question: “Which would you have chosen? Which would you have done?

Gorsuch replied, in his best law-school patronizing manner, “Oh, Senator, I don’t know what I would’ve done if I were in his shoes, and I don’t blame him at all for a moment for doing what he did do. I empathize with him entirely.” Which clearly is no answer.

So Franken pressed him again: “OK, we [have] been talking about this case [and] you haven’t decided what you would have done? Haven’t thought for a second what you would have done in his case?”

Responding defensively, Gorsuch said, “I thought a lot about this case.”

“And what would you have done?” Franken asked. “I’m asking you a question. Please answer the question,” Franken pressed.

“Senator, I don’t know,” the finest legal mind in all of conservative America answered. “I wasn’t in the man’s shoes, but I understand why . . . ”

“You don’t know what you would’ve done,” Franken summed up for him. “OK, I’ll tell you what I would’ve done. I would’ve done exactly what he did. And I think everybody here would’ve done exactly what he did. And I think that’s an easy answer. Frankly, I don’t know why you had difficulty answering that.”

From there, Franken turned to the dissent Gorsuch wrote. As Franken described it, the issue came down to a “plain meaning” rule: “When the plain meaning of a statute is clear on its face, when its meaning is obvious, courts have no business looking beyond the meaning to the statute’s purpose.” That’s what Gorsuch relied on in his ruling.

“But the plain meaning rule has an exception,” Franken continued. “When using the plain meaning rule would create an absurd result, courts should depart from the plain meaning,” he said. “It is absurd to say this company is within its rights to fire him because he made the choice of possibly dying from freezing to death or causing other people to die possibly by driving an unsafe vehicle. That’s absurd.”

Then Franken added, “I had a career in identifying absurdity,” referring to his former roles as a “Saturday Night Live” writer and performer, and people in the room briefly burst out in laughter. “And I know it when I see it . . . and it makes me question your judgment.”

How can one not question Gorsuch’s judgment after walking through the whole case like that? How could one not go further — and question his whole philosophy and the entire system of justifying and normalizing it that conservatives have spent the last few decades constructing?

Originally posted by G:
"I coined the slogan "We Suck!"© many years ago."
G is an avowed Putin-loving, pro-Russian, anti-American troll.

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Monday, April 3, 2017 6:56 PM

6STRINGJOKER

Was this grilling the Judge about it after the fact? How did the case go for Maddin in the end?

I need more to go on to have an opinion about this whole thing.

Obviously, Gorsuch was wrong in his statement that the company was within their rights for firing the guy. If he were a Union worker, they would have almost certainly fought on his behalf in this case.

I'd also need to see more judgements to make a fair assessment of the man. I'm willing to bet that any single judge who now or has ever been on the Supreme Court has made at least one poor judgement in their lives.

Not too many have been grilled by Stuart Smally though, and he is the first one to be judged by the Democrats, the MSM and the public in general for being a Trump pick.

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