Kath wrote:He needs eight D senators on board or it's a no go.
I see. Suddenly "do your job" doesn't mean the same thing.
So now Congress' job is to just say yes to whatever the president wants? When did that rule go into place? I imagine they'll vote... that's their job. To vote. Their job isn't to vote yes because president cry baby says so.
Yes. Refusing to do the job is different from voting no. This isn't rocket science. Did the Senate go through confirmation hearings during Obama's last year? No, they did not. That's refusing to do the job.
With perhaps one notable area of disagreement, Judge Gorsuch’s prominent decisions bear the comparison out. For one thing, the great compliment that Gorsuch’s legal writing is in a class with Scalia’s is deserved: Gorsuch’s opinions are exceptionally clear and routinely entertaining; he is an unusual pleasure to read, and it is always plain exactly what he thinks and why. Like Scalia, Gorsuch also seems to have a set of judicial/ideological commitments apart from his personal policy preferences that drive his decision-making. He is an ardent textualist (like Scalia); he believes criminal laws should be clear and interpreted in favor of defendants even if that hurts government prosecutions (like Scalia); he is skeptical of efforts to purge religious expression from public spaces (like Scalia); he is highly dubious of legislative history (like Scalia); and he is less than enamored of the dormant commerce clause (like Scalia).
Judge Pryor is no friend of criminal defendants. He very consistently sides with the government in criminal cases on issues both big and small. And he has almost never ruled in favor of a capital defendant.
. . .
In the free speech context, Pryor has steered a middle course. Consistent with his concurrence in Keeton v. Anderson-Wiley discussed above, Pryor has written of the importance of First Amendment rights, while also regularly upholding government restrictions on speech in particular contexts.
Hardiman was less sympathetic to other free speech claims. In Easton Area School District v. B.H., he dissented from a ruling in favor of students who wanted to be able to wear silicone bracelets with the slogan “I [Heart] Boobies” as part of a breast-cancer awareness campaign. Hardiman argued that the decision was “inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence.” Describing the case as a “close” one, he contended that the bracelets “would seem to fall into a gray area between speech that is plainly lewd and merely indecorous.” But he deemed it “objectively reasonable to interpret the bracelets, in the middle school context, as inappropriate sexual innuendo and double entendre.” A contrary ruling, he cautioned, would require schools “to permit more egregiously sexual advocacy messages.” The Supreme Court denied the school district’s petition for review without comment, indicating that there were not four votes to review the case on the merits, but not necessarily endorsing the decision of the lower court.
And in NAACP v. City of Philadelphia, Hardiman dissented from a panel opinion holding that the city’s ban on non-commercial advertisements by private advertisers at the city’s airport violated the First Amendment. Hardiman characterized the ban as “a reasonable attempt to avoid controversy at the airport” and thereby “create a comfortable environment” there.
Last edited by Fife on Thu Jan 26, 2017 2:40 pm, edited 1 time in total.
