Borking America : Mitt Romney Judicial Extremism And Ted Nugent's Violent Rhetoric ??? And Moyers & Eric Alterman Discuss "The Liberal Cause " Part 1/2

Mitt Romney's Judicial Extremism Exposed by People For The American Way

Ted Nugent and Mitt Romney

Mitt Romney Won’t Disavow Supporter Ted Nugent’s Violent Rhetoric at People For The American Way, April 2012

Contrary to some media reports, Mitt Romney has failed to disavow the inflammatory and violent remarks made by Ted Nugent on Saturday at the NRA national convention. Nugent, a longtime NRA board member, made his remarks one day after Romney addressed the convention.

Ted Nugent Stumps for Mitt Romney at NRA Convention: “Chop their heads off in November” (VIDEO)
Submitted by Josh Glasstetter on Mon, 04/16/2012

Borking America
WHAT ROBERT BORK WILL MEAN FOR THE SUPREME COURT AND AMERICAN JUSTICE By Jamie Raskin, Senior Fellow, People For The American Way

YES, AMERICA, ROBERT BORK IS BACK

But what does this appointment say to the rest of us? Surely Romney must be assuming that it is safe to accede and pander to the Right because we have all forgotten about Bork’s anti-consumer, anti-environmental and anti-worker record as a judge, not to mention his snarling opposition to women’s rights, civil rights and civil liberties — the hard-core positions that moved the Senate to reject his nomination by President Ronald Reagan to the United States Supreme Court on a bipartisan vote of 58-42.

Romney is also presumably trusting that, ever since Bork resigned from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to launch a career as a conservative polemicist with the American Enterprise Institute,1 most of the public has tuned out his increasingly bitter diatribes against the “feminized”2 Supreme Court and his embarrassing tirades against “American cultural decline,” and the social “rot and decadence” of our country.

But Romney’s elevation of Bork to advise him on the kinds of judges who should serve on the Supreme Court and the federal bench spells serious trouble for the American people. At a time when a pretty reliable 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court is already sanctifying the power of large corporations and closing down individual Americans’ access to the courts, when reproductive freedom and voting rights hang by a thread, it is a cause for public alarm that Romney wants to try once again to put Robert Bork in the driver’s seat of America’s constitutional journey.

...BORK’S SUPREME COURT NOMINATION: Extremism Exposed And Defeated

On July 1, 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Bork to the Supreme Court, setting off a profound national debate about the meaning of the Constitution and the role of the Justice. Is the Constitution the expansive charter of the freedoms and liberties of the people, as Justices like William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall argued, or is it a straitjacket on democratic freedom designed primarily to protect those with power, privilege, wealth and property? Bork’s performance was not reassuring. In his most reflective moment at his confirmation hearings, he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he wanted to serve on the Court because it offered him an “intellectual feast,” but most Americans rapidly came to the conclusion that, if Bork were seated at the table, they were themselves going to appear somewhere on the menu.

Bork’s opposition to reproductive freedom as a constitutional principle, his skepticism about modern civil rights law, his blithe constitutional acceptance of poll taxes and literacy tests, his reflexively pro-corporate, anti-worker and anti-environmentalist stances, his historical U-turns and dodgy answers all inspired a huge popular mobilization against him. Ultimately, his nomination was defeated with a strong, bipartisan vote of 58-42, with six Republicans voting no and two Democrats voting yes. (Lest one reach the conclusion that the Senate would have rejected anyone nominated to the Court by President Reagan, the body ultimately confirmed, by a vote of 97-0, the deeply conservative Anthony Kennedy, who later came to author the Court’s devastating Citizens United decision.)

Borking America at People For The American Way





Moyers and Eric Alterman Discuss "The Liberal Cause " Part 1/2
American Liberals suffer from a loss of self-confidence
Conservatives have managed to make Liberalism a dirty word
Liberals have been branded as UnAmerican



Moyers and Eric Alterman Discuss "The Liberal Cause "Part 2 of 2