The security clearance of any officer or employee of the federal government who has exercised extreme carelessness in the handling of classified information shall be revoked.” — Senate Bill 3135, co-sponsored last year (to shame Hillary Clinton) by 16 Republican senators: Cory Gardner, John Cornyn, Shelley Moore Capito, Tim Scott, James Risch, Pat Roberts, Dean Heller, Kelly Ayotte, John Barrasso, David Perdue, Johnny Isakson, Thom Tillis, John Thune, David Vitter, Mike Rounds and James Inhofe
“Those who mishandled classified info have had their sec clearances revoked, lost their jobs, faced fines, & even been sent to prison.”
— Reince Priebus, tweet, July 6, 2016
The Supreme Court Extremism of Clarence Thomas and Chuck Grassley
.. like many Republicans, he’s having a hard time explaining why he will not even give a hearing to Merrick Garland, President Barack Obama’s choice to replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Court. In defense of his position, Grassley gave a speech on the Senate floor that was close to breathtaking in its intemperate incoherence. The speech was an extended attack on Chief Justice John Roberts, who had recently expressed the unexceptional view that the Court should stay out of partisan politics as much as possible.
.. This hostility to Roberts comes in the face of the Chief Justice’s down-the-line conservatism in nearly every other case of his decade in office. Roberts joined the majority in Citizens United and in Shelby County (which eviscerated the Voting Rights Act), and he dissented in Windsor, the case that invalidated the Defense of Marriage Act, and Obergefell, which brought same-sex marriage to all fifty states. The decisions Grassley disagrees with are “political,” whereas the ones he likes are, presumably, just good judging. The crudeness of Grassley’s attack on Roberts, from a senator who claims to want to avoid a politicization of the court, is astonishing.
.. the Court approved a voting-apportionment process—currently used by every state—that requires all legislative districts to have an equal number of people. Conservatives had demanded a system where states could require districts of equal numbers of voters, so state legislators could ignored the numbers of non-citizens, children, disenfranchised felons, and others not eligible to vote in every district.
.. The Court responded to this obvious injustice by finding that, under the Fourteenth Amendment, courts must require that districts be drawn according to the principle of one person, one vote. No Justice has challenged this basic idea.
Now Thomas has done so, writing that the Court “has failed to provide a sound basis for the one-person, one-vote principle because no such basis exists.” His opinion excavates, as Thomas often does, his understanding of what James Madison intended when he wrote the Bill of Rights. In Thomas’s view, this history amounts to an almost total abdication by the Framers in favor of the rights of the states. By ruling that the Constitution requires the states to follow a one-person, one-vote principle, Thomas writes, “the Court has arrogated to the Judiciary important value judgments that the Constitution reserves to the people.”
.. In his opinion, Thomas ignores racial discrimination—and thus the central reason the Court, in the nineteen-sixties, imposed the one-person, one-vote rule. Thomas’s blindness to the realities of American life—and concomitant obsession with his understanding of the Framers’ intent—reflects his bizarre jurisprudential views.