So, at the end of the 1986-1987 Supreme Court term, Associate Justice Lewis Powell decided to retire from the Court. Accordingly, Justice Powell submitted his resignation letter to President Reagan. The president nominated Judge Robert Bork to replace Powell. Bork got voted down 58-42 by the United States Senate, the first Senate rejection of a Supreme Court nominee since Judge Harold Carswell’s nomination by President Nixon went down in flames. Afterwards, President Reagan nominated Anthony Kennedy, the Senate confirmed him, and the rest is history, right?
Pejman Yousefzadeh
Pejman Yousefzadeh
Scribbling, scribbling, scribbling on the Internet.
Tagged Scandal
Quote of the Day
In the midst of the 2012 reelection campaign, the White House appears to have covered up a story involving a presidential advance team member, a prostitute, and Secret Service agents, allowing the Secret Service to take the fall while denying the involvement of anyone on the advance-team. That’s the takeaway from a damning Washington Post report which finds that, according to both documentary and interview evidence, “senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged.”…
This Is Bad
Oh, this is very, very, very bad: As nearly two dozen Secret Service agents and members of the military were punished or fired following a 2012 prostitution scandal in Colombia, Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that anyone from the White House was involved. But new details drawn from government documents and interviews show that senior White House aides were given information at the time suggesting that a prostitute was an overnight guest in the hotel room of a presidential advance-team member — yet that information was never thoroughly investigated or publicly acknowledged. The information that the Secret Service shared with the White…
That Scandal the Obama Administration Assures Us Is Not a Scandal Sure Seems Scandalous
Wow: Anyone paying attention to the Internal Revenue Service scandal has been waiting for the next smidgen to drop. Well, two more hit pretty hard this week. At the president’s next encounter with the media, I will scream collusion if no one asks him for his exact definition of a “smidgen,” and if he thinks he has seen a smidgen of corruption yet. At this point, only the most gullible or culpable can continue to claim there is no compelling evidence in this case. Given the delays, lies and stonewalling, there is no viable argument against a special prosecutor. In a…
Reggie Walton Seems to Think that the IRS Scandal Is a Real Scandal
And since he is a federal judge, and everything, his thoughts carry a fair amount of weight: IRS attorneys will be even busier than normal next week, because another federal judge has told them to show up in court July 11 to defend the federal tax agency. They will have to explain to U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton why the IRS shouldn’t be required to let an outside expert evaluate whether emails on the computer hard drives of former IRS official Lois Lerner and six colleagues really are lost forever, as the agency recently told Congress. Responding to a motion filed Monday…
This Is What Integrity Looks Like
Wouldn’t it have been nice if someone like Johnnie Walters were in charge of the Internal Revenue Service these past several years? Johnnie M. Walters, a commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service under President Richard M. Nixon who left office after refusing to prosecute people on Nixon’s notorious “enemies list,” died on Tuesday at his home in Greenville, S.C. He was 94. His son Hilton confirmed the death. Nixon had fired his first I.R.S. commissioner, Randolph W. Thrower, for resisting White House pressure to punish political opponents. Mr. Thrower, who served from 1969 to 1971, died at 100 in March. Mr. Walters represented the Middle American…
Attention: The IRS Scandal Is Still a Scandal
I continue to be trapped in The Hellish Process That Is Moving, so blogging has been lighter than I have wanted it to be. I am hopelessly behind in some of the stories that I have wanted to write about, which is why I haven’t written recently about how the IRS scandal has gone from bad to worse. So, let me mention in this post the fact that the IRS scandal has gone from bad to worse. Anyone not living under a rock now knows that Lois Lerner and Friends have conveniently lost a bunch of e-mails. And yes, the IRS…
Rose Mary Woods, Meet Lois Lerner
I am still in the midst of moving Hell, so blogging will remain slow, but let it be noted that the famous 18 and 1/2 minute gap in the Nixon tapes has at long last met its modern day match. A hard drive crash has eliminated all of the e-mails of Lois Lerner, the central figure in the scandal involving the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups. What’s more; a host of other figures from the scandal have also had their e-mails deleted, and the recycling of Lerner’s hard drive means that Lerner’s e-mails are likely lost forever, despite the fact that…
Exeunt Shinseki
I don’t have much to say in response to the resignation of Eric Shinseki, except (a) the resignation was long overdue; (b) the resignation is not nearly enough to make up for the disgraceful treatment of veterans at VA hospitals (hospitals which were once praised as models for healthcare reform before the current scandal forced those who praised VA hospitals as models for healthcare reform to change their story and say that all of the problems at VA hospitals are the fault of the Bush administration); and (c) the resignation does nothing to allay concerns over the Obama administration’s–and the president’s–lackadaisical response to…
Begun, the Buck-Passing Has
Raise your hands if you are actually surprised by this: House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., repeatedly put the blame for the Veterans Affairs scandal on former President George W. Bush, while arguing that her party has worked hard for veterans in recent years. Pelosi took a shot at Bush while saying that the scandal is a high priority for Obama. “He sees the ramifications of some seeds that were sown a long time ago, when you have two wars over a long period of time and many, many more, millions more veterans,” she told reporters during her Thursday press briefing. “And so, I…
