TOPDOG08.COM

« "Not this President." | Main | Do two wrongs make a right-wing network? »

October 03, 2004

Judicial branch (of the campaign)

Looks like corruption has finally taken it's toll on the man:

Antonin Scalia, one of George W. Bush's favorite justices, was up at Harvard's John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum the other day, sharing his views with students, faculty and others on some distinctly extrajudicial matters.

He raised more than eyebrows in the room.

With the tiniest of promptings, Scalia shared his own personal view about the number of people needed for group sex.

You read that right: the number of people needed for group sex.

"Presumably, it is some number between five and the number of people required to fill the Coliseum," he said, according to an account in the Harvard Crimson....

Most surprising of all, he also weighed in on the benefits of orgies. "Sexual orgies," he said, "eliminate social tensions and ought to be encouraged."

All this from one of the most reliable conservatives on the modern Supreme Court. Scalia was nominated in 1986 by Ronald Reagan. From that day forward, he's been an intellectual stalwart of the court's conservative wing.

And it turns out he has orgies on his mind.

What else could he have on his mind? Well, there's this:

It is widely believed that Justice Antonin Scalia will be the next chief justice if George Bush wins a second term. But a number of recent incidents call Scalia's ethics into question.

Vice President Dick Cheney had to answer accusations over his involvement in the energy task force in court last year. It was later revealed that Cheney and Scalia had spent a few days duck hunting together at a private camp in southern Louisiana at the same time that Scalia was hearing Cheney's case, which brought Scalia's impartiality into question, leading to calls that he recuse himself from the case.

This was not the first time Scalia had assisted the Bush-Cheney team. It was Scalia's judgment that helped uphold their claims about the Florida polls in the 2000 US presidential elections. Scalia heard the case even though his son was a member of a law firm that was working for Bush.

Then this:

Democrats still reeling from the Bush v. Gore decision in December must have cringed when President Bush announced his choice for solicitor of the Labor Department. In April, Bush appointed Eugene Scalia, the 37-year-old son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, to the number-three spot at Labor. The younger Scalia's nomination was no mere act of nepotism, like, say, the appointment of 28-year-old Strom Thurmond, Jr., as South Carolina's U.S. attorney, or the appointment of Kentucky Senator Jim Bunning's son to a federal judgeship, or even the appointment of Janet Rehnquist, daughter of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, as the inspector general of the Health and Human Services Department. Scalia's nomination is on an entirely different scale.

As a labor lawyer at Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher, Eugene Scalia specialized in representing management in labor disputes. His area of expertise: downplaying the importance of worker safety, especially the dangers of repetitive-stress injuries. Scalia made his name fighting ergonomics rules like the ones enacted last year by the Clinton administration and recently repealed under Bush. "While the nomination of Scalia reflects Bush's affinity for children of powerful people, [it] also seems to reflect the administration's anti-regulatory priorities," says Marcia Kuntz, legislative director of the Alliance for Justice. "In fact, unlike Strom Thurmond, Jr., Scalia is already completely in sync with what the administration is trying to do. In a very narrow sense, you could even say he's qualified."

But Scalia has done more than just advocate his clients' opposition to ergonomic standards: Along with Baruch Fellner, another partner at Gibson, Dunn, he has emerged as the leading architect of the anti-ergonomics movement. Scalia refers to repetitive-stress injuries, which afflict 600,000 American workers annually, as "junk science," "quackery," and "strange." Though ergonomics is a well-documented science, he paints repetitive-stress injury as a "psychosocial issue"--in effect, calling those who suffer from it fakers. "The evidence is clear," Scalia has written, "that the employees most likely to complain of musculoskeletal discomfort are those who do not like their jobs." He has also advocated exempting unionized workplaces from OSHA inspections, to "free" workers from the "cigar-chomping, rough-and-tumble world of labor-management relations."

Almost forgot this one:

But during this case, it became clear that the Justices are not as insulated as we like to believe. Clarence Thomas' wife draws a paycheck from the conservative Heritage Foundation, where she has been vetting resumes for positions in a Bush Administration — an Administration her husband's vote helped usher in. Mrs. Thomas denies her work is for Bush and says she and her husband don't discuss his cases. But Lisa Lerman, a legal-ethics expert at Catholic University, calls the situation "unseemly."

Justice Scalia, the Bush camp's fiercest defender, has two sons employed by law firms working on the Bush postelection phase. And according to the Wall Street Journal, O'Connor's husband said at an election-night party that his wife, a 70-year-old breast-cancer survivor, would like to retire but that she would be reluctant to leave if a Democrat won the presidency and got to select her successor. Hers was a key swing vote that ensured a Republican victory. A conflict? Says Lerman: "At the very least it creates an appearance problem."

And this one:

Within the first hundred days and while media pundits were absorbed with wondering whether Chelsea Clinton had political aspirations, Colin Powell's son became head of the FCC. William Rehnquist's daughter was nominated for Inspector General with Health and Human Services. Antonin Scalia's son was made Solicitor of Labor. Clarence Thomas's wife was nominated for a top position in the Office of Management and Budget. And Strom Thurmond's son, only three years out of law school, was handpicked by Strom himself to be South Carolina's US Attorney.

At this rate, eight years from now Rudolph Giuliani's son will be our new Decency Czar, Newt Gingrich's fourth wife will head up the Compassionately Conservative Commission on the Alarming Breakdown of Family in the Inner City and Linda Chavez's favorite charitable donees will be directing the Spanish-for-the-House-and-Garden Literacy Campaign.

It's an orgy alright, just not the sexual kind. I'd call it an orgy of corruption.

Posted by Mike at October 3, 2004 04:08 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.topdog08.com/cgi-bin/mt-trackback.cgi/506

Comments

Post a comment