(Clips of Tom Delay and John Cornyn quoted below start after the 1:00 mark.)

On Monday, President Obama unsurprisingly expressed confidence that the Supreme Court would uphold the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Even less remarkable, Obama rightly reminded Americans that "conservative commentators" have for years said "the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law." Nevertheless, Republicans quickly accused the President of "unprecedented" effort to "intimidate the Supreme Court."

Of course, this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black (to put it mildly). After all, denouncing "judicial activism" has been a GOP talking point for years. Not content to rest there, the party's members of Congress and presidential candidates have pushed to limit the federal judiciary's jurisdiction on a range of issues, abortion not least among them. And as their incendiary rhetoric during the Terri Schiavo saga and other episodes reveals, Republican leaders didn't hesitate to issue none-too-thinly veiled threats of violence against the nation's judges.

Following the President's statement, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell led the GOP charge:

"This president's attempt to intimidate the Supreme Court falls well beyond distasteful politics. It demonstrates a fundamental lack of respect for our system of checks and balances."

While Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Karl Rove all called the President a "thug," McConnell doubled-down on Thursday, insisting Obama should "back off" because "the independence of the court must be defended."

Of course, back in 2005, McConnell played a pivotal role in the GOP effort to disregard the 19 rulings by Florida and federal courts, including the Supreme Court, in the case of Terri Schiavo. As he explained to an incredulous Brit Hume of Fox News:

What we simply did was grant to the courts an opportunity to review the case, something they do in habeas corpus petitions in death penalty cases all the time. It's not unusual for a death decision. And in effect, that's what's happening here.

A decision to let Ms. Schiavo die would be reviewed in the courts. That's all Congress did. The courts took a look at it, decided not to review it. And this tragic matter obviously is soon going to come to an end.

Not if Texas Senator John Cornyn had his way. Cornyn, himself a former chief judge of the Texas Supreme Court and author in 2010 of an attack on Obama nominee Elena Kagan titled, "I Sense a Judicial Activist," took the Republican assault on the judiciary to a new and frightening level. Cornyn was one of the GOP standard bearers in the conservative fight against so-called "judicial activism" in the wake of the Republicans' disastrous intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair. On April 4th, Cornyn took to the Senate floor to issue a dark warning to judges opposing his reactionary agenda. Just days after the murders of judge in Atlanta and another's family members in Chicago, Cornyn offered his endorsement of judicial intimidation:

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country...And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence."

Facing criticism for his remarks seemingly endorsing right-wing retribution against judges, Cornyn held his ground. "I didn't make the link," he said on Fox News Sunday, adding with a note of sarcasm:

"It was taken out of context. I regret it was taken out of context and misinterpreted."

As it turns out, Cornyn was merely echoing the words of the soon-to-be indicted House Majority Leader Tom Delay. On March 31st, Delay issued a statement regarding the consistent rulings in favor of Michael Schiavo by all federal and state court judges involved:

"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today."

As the New York Times reported:

Saying that the courts ''thumbed their nose at Congress and the president,'' Mr. DeLay, of Texas, suggested Congress was exploring responses and declined to rule out the possibility of Congressional impeachment of the judges involved.

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As The New York Times suggested last week, the fate of President Obama's Affordable Care Act in general, and its mandate that Americans obtain health insurance in particular, may hinge on Justice Anthony Kennedy's notion of "liberty." While Solicitor General Donald Verilli posited "a profound connection" between health care and liberty, his opponent Paul Clement argued, "that it's a very funny conception of liberty that forces somebody to purchase an insurance policy whether they want it or not."

Of course, that very conception of liberty has been the law of the land for decades. Today, tens of millions of Americans must purchase health insurance and a pension plan for their golden years. And as it turns out, the Medicare and Social Security mandates for individuals and employers dwarf anything required by the dreaded Obamacare.

As we learned during the recent debate over the extension of the payroll tax cut, 160 million Americans pay taxes to fund the Medicare and Social Security trusts for today and tomorrow's retirees. Since 1935, workers and their employers have each paid into the Social Security trust fund, a figure which next year will return to its 6.2 percent rate on the first $106,000 of income. In addition, employer and employee alike are on the hook for another 1.45 percent for Medicare, the insurance program for the elderly established in 1965.

In comparison, the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate impacts just a small fraction of Americans. For starters, over 80 percent already have health insurance, compared to roughly 17 percent who do not. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that 59 percent of those under age 65 receive employer-sponsored insurance, while another 22 percent are covered by public programs including Medicaid and SCHIP. Of the 50 million people who are currently uninsured, about 20 million (including undocumented immigrants and those with religious objections or claiming economic hardship), are not covered or are otherwise exempt from the health insurance mandate. As a recent Urban Institute analysis concluded:

What may be surprising, however, is that if the ACA were in effect today, 94 percent of the total population (93 percent of the nonelderly population) or 250.3 million people out of 268.8 million nonelderly people would not face a requirement to newly purchase insurance or pay a fine.

As Ryan Grim noted, that's because "98 percent of Americans would either be exempt from the mandate — because of employer coverage, public health insurance or low income — or given subsidies to comply." The Urban Institute estimated that 8.1 million Americans would have their insurance paid for by the expansion of Medicaid to 133 percent of the federal poverty level. Another 10.9 million people would receive subsidies to buy private insurance in the new state exchanges, while only 7.3 million (2 percent of the total U.S. population) would be required to purchase a health plan using their own resources alone. As for those Americans choosing to instead to pay the penalty for failing to obtain insurance at all, the CBO estimated that number at 4 million. (That forecast is almost double the rate in Massachusetts, where only 48,000 in a state of 6.6 million people opted to pay the penalty rather than acquire health insurance under Mitt Romney's version of the individual mandate.)

But if far more Americans pay the Social Security and Medicare mandates, the number of direct beneficiaries of "Obamacare" is much lower.

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Does Senator Jim Bunning always make an ass of himself? The hate and vitriol that comes from the right has been non-stop and offensive.

A year after surgery for pancreatic cancer, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told an audience last week that she is feeling well -- and then took a dig at the senator who had claimed after her surgery that she would only have nine months to live.

"I am pleased to report that, contrary to Sen. Bunning's prediction, I am alive and in good health," she said.

Jim Bunning, R-Ky., made the comments during a private fundraiser on Feb. 21, 2009, when he described Ginsburg's cancer as "bad cancer -- the kind that you don't get better from."

He later apologized in a statement in which he misspelled the Justice's name. "I apologize if my comments offended Justice Ginsberg," Bunning then said.

Good for Judge Ginsburg not to back down to a republican bully.

And she also took a shot at Liz Cheney for attacking the loyalty of lawyers who represent terrorists.

Ginsburg also weighed in on the recent controversy, fueled by Liz Cheney, questioning the loyalty of U.S. lawyers representing accused terrorists.

Cheney, heading the group Keep America Safe, has criticized President Obama for naming nine lawyers to posts at the Department of Justice after the lawyers had provided legal assistance prior to their government service to Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Ginsburg said she was "unsettled, indeed alarmed" by such criticism. "One of the nine was a former law clerk of mine, a young man of great intelligence, integrity and devotion to the ideals that make the U.S.A. a great nation," she said.

Ginsburg went on to praise lawyers who serve on a pro bono basis even for clients who might be unpopular.

"To that expression of the true America Way, one can only say Amen," she said.

By the way, he only controversy is that Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol attacked the loyalty and ethics of our own legal profession and the lawyers that work there.

I've been worried about the money pouring into judicial elections ever since I read John Grisham's "The Appeal."

The book is based on Caperton v. A.T. Massey Coal in West Virginia, detailing the strong financial support and friendship between the judge and the defendant. The judge refused to recuse himself. And as blogger AngryYoungDem points out:

Elected judges become additional legislatures. Want to get rid of punitive damages against corporations? Bankroll a candidate who supports corporate interests. Can't get the legislature to pass a gay-marriage bill? Bankroll 3-5 gay-marriage supporters and stack the state supreme court. Judicial elections are cheaper anyway, so you save money by focusing on elected judges instead of elected representatives.

And now, even Supreme Court justices are speaking out:

In rare public remarks last week, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the money involved in electing judges remains one of the most pressing concerns facing the American court system. And she joined her former colleague, Sandra Day O'Connor, in calling for reform.

"If there's a reform I would make, it would be that," Ginsburg said when asked about the issue at the National Association of Women Judges Thursday night.

Yet money has continued to pour into the campaign accounts of state judges around the country, and ABC News has obtained an advanced copy of a study showing the amounts involved are unprecedented.

In the past decade, candidates for state judgeships raised more than $206 million, more than double the $83 million judges raised in the 1990s, according to the soon-to-be released study by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law and Justice at Stake, two non partisan groups that advocate for reforming the judicial selection process.

Three of the last five state Supreme Court election cycles topped $45 million. And judges shattered fundraising records in all but two of the 21 states with contested Supreme Court elections in the last ten years, the report found.

"State judicial elections have been transformed," the report says, and the money involved has created "a grave and growing challenge to the impartiality of our nation's courts."

I remember arguing with Democratic strategists about the Alito and Roberts nominations to the Supreme Court. I said instead of focusing on abortion rights, a divisive issue, we should sound the alarm about their strongly pro-corporatist rulings. But hey, what do I know?

And now, the predictable results. I can't tell you how depressed I am about this:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has ruled that corporations may spend freely to support or oppose candidates for president and Congress, easing decades-old limits on their participation in federal campaigns.

By a 5-4 vote, the court on Thursday overturned a 20-year-old ruling that said corporations can be prohibited from using money from their general treasuries to pay for their own campaign ads. The decision, which almost certainly will also allow labor unions to participate more freely in campaigns, threatens similar limits imposed by 24 states.

It leaves in place a prohibition on direct contributions to candidates from corporations and unions.

Critics of the stricter limits have argued that they amount to an unconstitutional restraint of free speech, and the court majority apparently agreed.

"The censorship we now confront is vast in its reach," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his majority opinion, joined by his four more conservative colleagues.

However, Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting from the main holding, said, "The court's ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions around the nation."

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor joined Stevens' dissent, parts of which he read aloud in the courtroom.

The justices also struck down part of the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill that barred union- and corporate-paid issue ads in the closing days of election campaigns.

Advocates of strong campaign finance regulations have predicted that a court ruling against the limits would lead to a flood of corporate and union money in federal campaigns as early as this year's midterm congressional elections.

Unfortunately, Scalia's right. According to the rule of after-discovered evidence (I became familiar with it when I was a reporter and covering a similar case), an innocent man can still be put to death if the evidence that could have exonerated him should have been brought forth during the original trial. There are exceptions, but that's the gist:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a federal trial court in Georgia to consider the case of Troy Davis, who is on death row in state prison there for the 1989 murder of an off-duty police officer. The case has attracted international attention, and 27 former prosecutors and judges had filed a brief supporting Mr. Davis.

Seven of the witnesses against Mr. Davis have recanted, and several people have implicated the prosecution’s main witness as the actual killer of the officer, Mark MacPhail.

The Supreme Court’s decision was unsigned, only a paragraph long and in a number of respects highly unusual. It instructed the trial court to “receive testimony and make findings of fact” about whether new evidence clearly established Mr. Davis’s innocence. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who joined the court this month, did not participate.

The decision set off a sharp debate between Justices John Paul Stevens and Antonin Scalia about Supreme Court procedure, the reach of a federal law meant to limit death row appeals and the proper treatment of claims of innocence.

“The substantial risk of putting an innocent man to death,” Justice Stevens wrote in a concurrence joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, “clearly provides an adequate justification for holding an evidentiary hearing.”

Justice Scalia, in a dissent joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, said the hearing would be “a fool’s errand,” because Mr. Davis’s factual claims were “a sure loser.”

He went on to say that the federal courts would be powerless to assist Mr. Davis even if he could categorically establish his innocence.

“This court has never held,” Justice Scalia wrote, “that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

We have opening statements this morning and I see they are about to take a break for lunch...Your thoughts?

Here's an article stating that Conservatives on the bench are the activists in our midst:

We found that justices vary widely in their inclination to strike down Congressional laws. Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was the most inclined, voting to invalidate 65.63 percent of those laws; Justice Stephen Breyer, appointed by President Bill Clinton, was the least, voting to invalidate 28.13 percent. The tally for all the justices appears below.

Thomas 65.63 %

Kennedy 64.06 %

Scalia 56.25 %

Rehnquist 46.88 %

O’Connor 46.77 %

Souter 42.19 %

Stevens 39.34 %

Ginsburg 39.06 %

Breyer 28.13 %

One conclusion our data suggests is that those justices often considered more "liberal" - Justices Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and John Paul Stevens - vote least frequently to overturn Congressional statutes, while those often labeled "conservative" vote more frequently to do so. At least by this measure (others are possible, of course), the latter group is the most activist.

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Considering the current makeup of the court -- and the long-established propensity of Arthur Kennedy to lean right on civil-rights cases -- this probably isn't a surprise, just deeply unfortunate:

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Monday that white firefighters in New Haven, Conn., were unfairly denied promotions because of their race, reversing a decision that high court nominee Sonia Sotomayor endorsed as an appeals court judge.

New Haven was wrong to scrap a promotion exam because no African-Americans and only two Hispanic firefighters were likely to be made lieutenants or captains based on the results, the court said Monday in a 5-4 decision. The city said that it had acted to avoid a lawsuit from minorities.

The ruling could alter employment practices nationwide and make it harder to prove discrimination when there is no evidence it was intentional.

"Fear of litigation alone cannot justify an employer's reliance on race to the detriment of individuals who passed the examinations and qualified for promotions," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in his opinion for the court. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the white firefighters "understandably attract this court's sympathy. But they had no vested right to promotion. Nor have other persons received promotions in preference to them."

Justices Stephen Breyer, David Souter and John Paul Stevens signed onto Ginsburg's dissent, which she read aloud in court Monday.

You can read the ruling here [PDF]. Ginsburg's dissent is especially worth reading, since she thoroughly eviscerates the skewed logic the conservatives applied here. The key graf:

By order of this Court, New Haven, a city in which African-Americans and Hispanics account for nearly 60 percent of the population, must today be served as it was in the days of undisguised discrimination by a fire department in which members of racial and ethnic minorities

are rarely seen in command positions. ... The Court's order and opinion, I anticipate, will not have staying power.

There's also a lot of speculation about how this will affect Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Court, since the ruling overturned here was hers. However, what's clear also is that if anyone is being an "activist judge" here, it is the Court's right-wing faction.

As People for the American Way observed in its statement:

Sotomayor and her panel colleagues were bound by longstanding precedent and federal law. They applied the law without regard to their personal views and unanimously affirmed the district court ruling. To do anything but would have been judicial activism.

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In a surprise verdict for the Roberts court:

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the strip search of a 13-year-old schoolgirl violated the constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure.

In a closely watched case filled with poignant facts, the court ruled 8-1 that Arizona school officials violated student Savana Redding's Fourth Amendment rights when they searched her down to her bra and underpants. Officials were looking for pain relievers, which they didn't find.

"The content of the suspicion failed to match the degree of intrusion," Justice David Souter wrote for the majority.

The ruling involving Redding, who's now a college student, has been anticipated by schools nationwide, which must balance concerns about student privacy with adult fears of drug abuse and school violence.

And guess who the lone hold out was on the court? Clarence Thomas.

Justice Clarence Thomas was the only member of the court to decide that the search of Redding was reasonable.

The court divided more closely, though, on whether the individual school officials who oversaw the search should be liable for damages. While seven members agreed that the officials were immune from lawsuits, Justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg contended that the school's assistant principal, Kerry Wilson, should be held liable.

"Wilson's treatment of Redding was abusive and it was not reasonable for him to believe that the law permitted it," said Ginsburg, the court's only female member.

Scott Lemieux has a great post up about the Roberts courts and how he never sides with individual rights:

In light of two controversial 5-4 Supreme Court decisions this week, Matt is reminded of Jeffrey Toobin's point that "In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff."...read on

Maybe they read his post...

I've been watching Arlen Specter for most of my life, and all I can say is, if you think he can be trusted, you're just not paying attention. He needs to prove he can't be controlled, and it's always when you least expect it. Harry Reid must have cut some kind of deal with him on the SCOTUS nominee, and while I hope I'm wrong, I predict he will be more trouble than he's worth:

WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)--President Barack Obama's first nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court could be an early test for Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter as a newly minted Democrat.

Specter's announcement this week that he was switching parties after 43 years in the GOP rocked Washington and put the Democrats close to a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate.

Specter could prove a key vote in any fight over Obama's Supreme Court pick if the Republicans attempt to amount a filibuster of the president's choice to replace Justice David Souter, who is retiring.

"I would expect him to support Obama's nominee unless it's a real radical," said Roger Pilon of the Cato Institute.

Sheldon Goldman, a political-science professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said Specter's vote could be "absolutely crucial" and predicted that the senator would be a strong backer of Obama's pick.

"Obama is in a terrific position," he said.

When it comes to Senate consideration of Supreme Court nominees, the Pennsylvania senator has perhaps the most colorful history of any current lawmaker, having angered colleagues in both parties.

"I supported very conservative nominees like Justice [Antonin] Scalia and very liberal nominees like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg," Specter said in Philadelphia Friday. "I think that's the way it ought to be."