Aside from a few high-profile issues, most Supreme Court decisions are read into the casebooks without public notice. We've gone almost four full years since Bush restaffed the court with Alito and Roberts, yet there has been little examination of their impact on jurisprudence.

That's changing. As the fight over Obama's first appointment picks up and attention turns to the future of the Court, we can expect examination of the Court's present. Jeff Toobin gets the ball rolling, noting that its Chief Justice is a wingnut:

The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. 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. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

The article is a great foundation for understanding the stakes with this nomination.

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."

I know that this is a few days old, but still deserves to be seen again. Rachel Maddow reports on Judge Bybee's CIA memo that involves torturing a prisoner with insects. It's 1984 all over again. This is sick and it shows how disturbed Dick Cheney and his henchmen at the OLC were and still are.
And this man is one step away from the Supreme Court, where he'd have a nice relationship with Scalia, I'm sure. He needs to be impeached.
Pat Leahy says that Bybee should just resign.

If that's the case, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), told reporters Tuesday, then Bybee should resign. "The fact is, the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee did not tell the truth. If the Bush administration and Mr. Bybee had told the truth, he never would have been confirmed," said Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The decent and honorable thing for him to do would be to resign. And if he is a decent and honorable person, he will resign," he said deliberately.

County Fair has a long list of conservative reactions to the release of the torture memos.

It's one big laugh-O-thon.

Numerous conservative media figures have downplayed, mocked, and jeered the notion that the use on detainees of harsh interrogation techniques authorized by the recently released Justice Department memos constitutes torture. Listed below are further examples of conservative media personalities making light of the idea that such practices constitute torture:

• During the April 16 edition of CNN's No Bias, No Bull, convicted Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy compared the proposed technique of placing a detainee who "appears to have a fear of insects" in "a cramped confinement box with an insect" to his appearance on a game show, stating, "I went through worse on Fear Factor."

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