House Committee v. Miers

I have a fun assignment in con law this week. We are going over the case mentioned in the title of this post. It stems from the Federal judge firings that happened a little while ago. The House of Rep. wanted some of the presidents aids to come before the house oversight committee and the president refused to hand them over. Usually when the house orders a subpoena and some fails to show they can hold that person in contempt and send federal marshals to arrest them. The marshals of course are part of the executive so in this case if congress asked the marshals to arrest presidential aids, most likely the president would say no. When two branches contradict each other this is a called a constitutional crisis. So instead of holding the aides in contempt the house sued the president. The district court judge ruled in favor of the house, saying that the executive need to hand over Miers. So, the teacher divided the class into the two sides and, we will argue it in class as if we were in the supreme court. On Tuesday the professor will pull names out of a hat and you are either represent the Executive, the Legislative or the Judges. I am going to bring a fake gavel just in case I get called up as a judge. We are supposed to represent specific judges (Roberts, Thomas, Scalia...)and I hope I get picked for that job so much. Peace out bitches

Verbal Bitch Slaping

For this post I think that I will just rant a bit, so please bear with me. My most intense class has been constitutional law. We receive about three times as much reading in this class comparatively. We just got done reading three cases about enemy combatants. I don’t know if any of you remember I had a nightmare about being classified as an enemy combatant. Anyway, I digress back to the law. The three cases were Hamdi v.Rumsfeld (2004), Hamden v. Rumsfeld(2006) and Boumediene v. Bush (2008), all three cases revolve around Guantanamo and prisoners of war. They are presented as rulings over detainee rights, but are more or less battles between the Judicial and the Executive branches for control. It seems that both branches have been usurping powers away from the legislative and, the fact that the legislative is so split politically means it is less effective. The executive set up military tribunals, bypassing the legislative and the judicial. The legislative being charged with making the laws, however did nothing to slow down the executives power grab. This is where the Judicial laid the smack down. They asserted their right to decide what the law is and in essence bypassed the legislative to remake the laws. I should note that in the Boumedine case the courts rejected the Legislatives ability to write the Executive a blank check for power. The vote came out 5v4 and the 4 dissenters were very upset. Justice Scolia Said “ The nation will to regret what the court has done today”. There were many other verbal bitch slaps in the dissent, I suggest every one read that case.

Page 3 article

Page 3

Hey, I made page 3 of my local paper. Because of privacy issues: if you are a real fan of the blog, and not just a relative or a friend of a relative, I can't tell you what paper or what my name is. but I'm sure you can figure it out. it's probably on this blog somewhere.

It's just in situations like this I know exactly what George would do. (He would probably never get into this situation in the first place.) basically I may or may not be a local hero, but I'm already regretting doing what I've done, and not just because my arms are covered in poison oak (that's the poison plant we have on the west coast for all you east coasters).

tangent, notice how I didn't call you the right coast... please do me the same favor. I am a conservative on this issue. I like north south east west. (besides do you always look at a map north pointing forward or up? ok, maybe you do. still) calling us the left coast won't make you cool or hip. it will just piss me off.

back to the problem. I've been called a local hero twice today. I'm already embarrassed about it, just having one neighbor, one swimming buddy and one friend call me up. it'd be so much cooler, if I did it anonymously. of course I did get a case of Sierra Nevada for my efforts, but I'll need to drink it up, just to forget about the itching oils all over my arms.

I'm just easily embarrassed. I lose on purpose, just so I don't have to deal with the embarrassment/attention of winning. Part of the reason might be I lost so much in youth soccer and baseball, that I got quite comfortable with not winning.


this is why I admire George Costanza so much. He rarely gets embarrassed. He would never get embarrassed for winning or doing something good. If I am drunk for the next few days, know that I am avoiding the attention and the poison oak.

-Over and Out from the west coast. maybe west is too close to best, is that you're problem?