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Tag: john paul stevens
Retired Justice Stevens Says Trump Must ‘Comply’ With Subpoenas

Retired Justice Stevens Says Trump Must ‘Comply’ With Subpoenas

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

When President Gerald R. Ford appointed John Paul Stevens to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1975, it was hailed as a victory for conservatism: Stevens replaced Justice William O. Douglas, an unapologetically liberal Franklin Delano Roosevelt nominee who had been on the High Court since 1939. Yet even though he was a conservative and Democrats controlled the U.S. Senate in 1975, Stevens was confirmed unanimously; not one Democratic senator voted against his confirmation. And the 99-year-old Stevens, who retired in 2010 and was replaced by Barack Obama appointee Elena Kagan, reflected on the current state of the Supreme Court and U.S. politics in an interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Jess Bravin.

President Donald Trump is vowing to resist all subpoenas issued by investigative committees in the Democrat-led House of Representatives—and Stevens believes that Trump is overreaching.

“I think there are things we should be concerned about, there’s no doubt about that,” Stevens tells Bravin in his article. And he goes on to elaborate, “The president is exercising powers that do not really belong to him. I mean, he has to comply with subpoenas and things like that.”

When Bravin asked Stevens how the Supreme Court might—in light of the fact that it now includes two Trump appointees, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch—rule on the current conflict between Democratic House committees and the Trump Administration, Stevens responded, “I wouldn’t want to predict that anybody’s going to take the incorrect view. But certainly, the correct view is pretty clear.”

One of the most revealing parts of Bravin’s interview with Stevens is the former justice’s views on political gerrymandering. Republicans are often criticized by Democrats in 2019 for gerrymandering congressional districts, and Stevens told Bravin he is “disappointed” by federal judges’ “failure to treat political gerrymandering just like racial gerrymandering, because it’s certainly easier to identify which voters belong to a particular party than knowing what their race is.”

After Douglas announced his retirement in 1975, Ford was filling the first Supreme Court vacancy since President Richard Nixon had resigned because of the Watergate scandal in August 1974. Ford picked an appellate judge who had been appointed by Nixon, and he was seeking to replace a New Deal liberal who was exiting the Supreme Court with someone whose family wasn’t known for liking the New Deal.

Bravin recalls, “Many Court watchers expected Justice Stevens, the successor to Franklin Roosevelt’s last remaining appointee, to move the Court rightward. During the 1930s, the Stevens family—whose name adorned a prominent Chicago hotel—was no fan of the New Deal, and the justice remains skeptical of liberal verities like the minimum wage.”

But Bravin adds that by the time he retired, the justice “was the unlikely head of the Court’s liberal minority. He attributes that more to the ideological purity subsequent Republican presidents required of their judicial nominees than to any leftward evolution of his own views.”

In other words, Stevens is still a conservative in 2019. And one could argue that philosophically, he never left the Republican Party—it left him.

IMAGE: Photo of retired Justice John Paul Stevens, Legal Times via Flickr

 

 

Retired Justice Stevens Says Some Guantanamo Captives May Deserve Reparations

Retired Justice Stevens Says Some Guantanamo Captives May Deserve Reparations

By Carol Rosenberg, Miami Herald (TNS)

MIAMI — Retired U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens shattered the taboo on talking about reparations for Guantanamo captives this week in a speech that said some of the nearly 800 men and boys held at the Pentagon’s prison camps in Cuba may be entitled to compensation, like Japanese-Americans who were interned in World War II.

“I by no means suggest that every Guantanamo detainee, such as those who have been convicted by a military commission, is entitled to compensation,” he said Monday in prepared remarks for meeting of the nonprofit Lawyers for Civil Justice group. “But detainees who have been deemed not to be a security threat to the United States and have thereafter remained in custody for years are differently situated.”

In doing so, the 95-year-old justice who was appointed by Gerald Ford, retired in 2010 and replaced by Elena Kagan stepped into an ongoing tug-of-war between the White House and Congress about what to do with the last 122 captives at Guantanamo — 57 of them approved for release, with host country security assurances.

Many of them are Yemeni, and many of them were provisionally approved for transfer by Bush administration review boards and then again by a 2009 task force set up by President Barack Obama. Neither administration would repatriate them, citing insecurity in their country. The Obama administration, however, has been trying to fashion individual resettlement deals for some of them in other countries on a case-by-case basis.

But Congress has made that increasingly difficult. Successive legislation has forbidden the transfer of detainees to the United States for any reason, and imposed other restrictions. Now, the GOP-led House Armed Services Committee has adopted legislation that would expand the restrictions to require Secretary of Defense certification that a detainee’s future dangerousness has been mitigated and forbid transfer to certain countries likely seen as suitable locations by the Obama administration, such as Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Oman.

At the White House on Wednesday, spokesman Josh Earnest lamented congressional “barriers” to Obama’s goal of closing the detention center, calling the prison “not consistent with the wise use of our government resources” and “counterproductive.”

He did not, however, offer an opinion on the idea of reparations.

A few former detainees have tried to sue the United States for compensation, using different legal theories. But U.S. government lawyers have successfully thwarted having the cases heard. In 2010, Britain paid undisclosed millions in compensation to former Guantanamo prisoners who accused the British government of complicity in their U.S. detention.

Stevens, a U.S. Navy veteran of World War II, called the detention center a “wasteful extravagance” that should be closed “as promptly as possible.” He adopted a calculus that currently estimates it costs three million dollars a year to keep a single detainee at Guantanamo — a formula the commander of the U.S. Southern Command, Marine General John F. Kelly, disputed a year ago in sworn testimony.

Stevens’ talk, which was posted on the U.S. Supreme Court website, invoked President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to intern thousands of Japanese-Americans during World War II, and noted that the United States twice paid reparations — $37 million in 1948 and $1.2 billion in 1988. He also noted that the Bush administration released the overwhelming majority of detainees released from the prison camps opened in Cuba.

His remarks come as four former Guantanamo captives who were released in December to resettlement in Montevideo, Uruguay, have been protesting at the U.S. Embassy seeking compensation for their lost years at the prison camps in Cuba. Those men included Syrians who had been cleared for a long portion of their time at Guantanamo but whom the U.S. concluded could not be safely repatriated.

Stevens wrote the Supreme Court’s landmark 2006 decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that struck down Bush’s first effort at trying war-on-terror captives by military commission, forcing the president to obtain congressional approval for the war court. Two years earlier, he wrote the majority opinion in Rasul v. Bush, which held that Guantanamo captives were entitled to habeas corpus review — something Congress for a time thwarted through legislation. Neither mentioned reparations.

Photo: Legal Times via Twitter

5 Lowlights From The 2014 NRA Convention

5 Lowlights From The 2014 NRA Convention

guns don't kill people

AFP Photo/Karen Bleier

After successfully beating back congressional attempts to strengthen gun laws, and watching firearm sales rocket to a 27-year high, one might think that the National Rifle Association would be in a good mood at its annual convention, which took place in Indianapolis over the weekend.

But that wasn’t the case; as in past years, the gathering was dominated by the twin themes of paranoia about a coming government gun grab, and anger at liberal elitists who want to take away your freedom.

The weekend was filled with events and speeches illustrating the NRA’s warped worldview — but some veered even further away from the mainstream than expected. Here are five of the lowlights:

Wayne LaPierre Plagiarizes Himself

It wouldn’t be an NRA meeting without an apocalyptic speech by the group’s executive vice president and CEO, Wayne LaPierre, who took to the podium on Friday to warn that America is collapsing — and only guns can save you now.

“We know, in the world that surrounds us, there are terrorists and home invaders and drug cartels and carjackers and knockout gamers and rapers, haters, campus killers, airport killers, shopping mall killers, road-rage killers, and killers who scheme to destroy our country with massive storms of violence against our power grids, or vicious waves of chemicals or disease that could collapse the society that sustains us all,” LaPierre said.

“I ask you. Do you trust this government to protect you?” he asked. “We are on our own. That is a certainty, no less certain than the absolute truth…the life or death truth that when you’re on your own, the surest way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun!”

If that paranoid rhetoric sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard it before. As Media Matters’ Matt Gertz points out, LaPierre’s speech is nearly identical to the fear-mongering address that he delivered to CPAC just one month earlier. The only substantive difference is a quick reference to former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plan to spend $50 million on gun reform (conveniently, it seems that the only way to stop Bloomberg’s power grab is to donate money to LaPierre’s NRA).

Sarah Palin Endorses Torture

Former Alaska governor Sarah Palin once again demonstrated her nuanced take on global affairs on Saturday, when she told the crowd at the NRA “Stand And Fight” rally that — if she were president — waterboarding would be “how we baptize terrorists.”

“C’mon! Enemies who would utterly annihilate America, they would obviously have information on plots. They carry out jihad. Oh, but you can’t offend them. Can’t make them feel uncomfortable, not even a smidgen,” Palin said mockingly. “Well, if I were in charge, they would know that waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists.”

Palin’s remarks, which provide a handy reminder of why she is not in charge, come at the 7-minute mark of her speech:


Mark Levin Rips “French Republicans”

Mark Levin took plenty of shots at Democrats during his speech on Friday — among other attacks, he falsely claimed that “the Internal Revenue Service has been sicced on conservative and Tea Party organizations, and the Democrats defend it,” and said, “I’d say guns are dangerous in the hands of liberals,” before suggesting that the Constitution should be amended to protect “the right to bear arms unless you’re a liberal” — but the right-wing radio host saved his best barbs for his own party.

“Meanwhile, the other party acts like a bunch of French Republicans, confounded, confused, not sure what to do,” Levin said.

“They’re looking for a new agenda, they’re looking for a way to reach out. I have one. It’s called the Constitution of the United States,” he continued. “They’re looking for a new economic policy. I have one. It’s called capitalism.”

I’m sure the French Republicans running for president in 2016 are eagerly awaiting their first Levin-hosted debate.

David Clarke Attacks A 94-Year-Old Man


Milwaukee County Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. — an outspoken “gun rights” advocate who once warned that “the Obama-Marxist types want to start a civil war in this country” by reforming gun laws — earned loud applause for his broadside against retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Responding to Stevens’ nuanced argument for altering the Second Amendment, Clarke presented the following case:

“Our Second Amendment is under siege by intellectual elitists like former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote in an editorial in the Washington Com-Post newspaper” — get it? — “that this confusion over the meaning of the Second Amendment could be solved by adding five words. He would rewrite it to read, ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms when serving in the Militia shall not be infringed.'”

“I have a better way of clearing up any confusion that activist judges have about the meaning of the Second Amendment. I would add these seven words at the end of the clause,” Clarke said. “Keep your hands off our guns, damnit.”

Larry Pratt Still Loves Cliven Bundy

larry pratt

Photo: Gage Skidmore via Flickr

After right-wing hero Cliven Bundy revealed himself to be a racist crackpot, most of his erstwhile supporters cut ties with him at top speed. But according to Gun Owners of America executive director and noted crazy person Larry Pratt, Bundy’s offensive meltdown did nothing to diminish the historic events that occurred in Bunkerville, Nevada.

“I think that this is a very positive development that came out of the confrontation out on that ranch,” Pratt said at the convention on Saturday, as reported by Media Matters. “And hopefully we will look back on what happened there as a turning point in modern American history. The American people are saying ‘Enough, no farther.'”

“I think we really are hopefully on an upswing,” he reportedly added. “We are seeing, finally, a proper, legitimate, lawful response to illegitimate, unlawful exercise of government power, particularly on the federal level.”

Unfortunately for Pratt, few people were on hand to hear his defense of Bundy and his militia allies; according to Media Matters, his speech — which took place outside of the Indiana Convention Center that played host to most of the meeting — was attended by only about 20 people.