It was published in 1979-- before Reagan got his filthy mitts on the Supreme Court.
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That’s probably my absolute favorite line of the whole movie!
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“Joey, do you like movies about gladiators?”
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And that’s my second favorite.
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Having somewhere to nap and occasionally be cantankerously dissentful does sound like a pretty sweet gig.
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I sympathize with his wife, so I’ll take dying as an alternative as well.
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This will sound weird, but I see Bill Walton a lot. He lives in San Diego and he’s a big concert-goer and Deadhead. I know we’ll likely see him in the crowd at Phish, Widespread Panic and Dead and Company next month. He’s hard to miss.
He goes to a lot of the smaller shows at clubs, too, seen him every time Chris Robinson Brotherhood comes to town. Brings his own giant folding chair and sits near the sound board. It’s really weird how tall he is when you stand next to the guy…
Anyway, I always think of that line when we see him. 
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It doesn’t sound weird at all. I met him briefly at Point Loma when I was a kid at Track camp (SI was talking pictures of him) in 1978 or 1979?
My husband used to chat with him a lot a few years back. They would swap John Wooden inspirational sayings. My husband went to Wooden’s basketball camp and the most inspirational thing Wooden said to him was, “Tuck in your shirt, son.” Apparently, Walton loved that.
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Probably the Dickinson in Pennsylvania.
If Clinton wins it will be a mandate for her to appoint solid left-wing justices, since that’s what the GOP is claiming she will do.
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It’s long past time America’s government caught up with the population in “liberalism”
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Those aren’t the adjectives I’d use to describe her campaign, but yeah, sure…
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Probably just waiting until he can rule on the Cosby case.
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If a Democrat – presumably Hillary Clinton – wins the 2016 election,
they could leave office with a 7-2 “liberal” bench that could endure for
years to come
Please.
If Hillary is elected and we still have a Republican Senate, I can picture McConnell now: he’ll be opining that the 4-4 standoff is just right. It just makes so much sense, it’s so much more fair if both sides are equally represented on the Court. And (did you know?) there is no provision in the Constitution as to the number of justices, anyway:
And, when he pulls this trick, there will be no recourse. There is no provision, save impeachment, if the Senate decides to stop nominating SCOTUS justices-- and why would Republicans impeach their own?
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Hmm.
Stephen Breyer describes himself as a pragmatist. He likes the idea of “active liberty”-- that the purpose of the constitution is to encourage the active participation of the people in governing the nation.
Also, he likes Administrative law.
Critics on the left and the right regard Breyer as more of a technocrat than an ideologue. “His dream job would be as a European Union commissioner, reviewing cheese quotas from around the region,” M. Edward Whelan III, the president of the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center, said. Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School, who clerked for Breyer on the First Circuit, said, “Believe it or not, the thing that most excites him is administrative law.”
If you’re looking for idealism, though, he recently called for the abolishment of capital punishment.
The problem for someone with Breyer’s sensibilities is that up to very recently, the court had a working majority bloc of conservative justices, and some political machinations are required to advance liberal priorities. Dissents may be fun to read, but they have no force of law.
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Not only that, when you disagree with someone you write pages and pages about how they’re wrong and generations of legal scholars will pore over your words for perpetuity. I can’t even get a word in edgewise without the wife being like “Nope! Shut it!”
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Well, she wouldn’t want to disappoint them. I also understand she’ll need to take her oath of office on a blood-soaked Koran with fake birth certificate.
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I’d pay good money to see that.
I guess that would make a lot more sense if EU commissioners were engaged in administrative law i.e. judicial review of administrative action, rather than setting policy which is what they do.
But then that’s from a US right wing think tank so I guess they get their idea of how the EU works, and it really does sound like it here, from the UK press.
Here’s a post from a correspondent on a right wing, Murdoch owned, newspaper about how they got their narrative. I’m not sure it’s true but there is an element of it in there.
Please forgive the second quote appearing as if it’s from you rather than the person who actually said it.
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That’s a good point. So much of what Americans read about the EU is distorted by the peculiar biases of the Anglophone press.
…Administrative law may sound deadly boring-- but a lot of what the Supreme Court does involves determining whether an executive branch agency’s regulation falls within the scope of the authority granted to it by Congress. Ignore it at your peril.
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