Hatch's activist judges

Sen. Hatch warns President Obama: you better not appoint a "liberal activist" to the Supreme Court, or what he will still vote against his nominee? How is this a real threat? Can he bring Sen. Brown or one of the Maine Senators with him?

I mean, I know that Sen. Hatch technically represents Utah and he used to Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and is still on the committee, but he isn't even ranking member anymore. The Republicans' choice for chairman is a guy who was denied a federal judgeship because he was too racist. So why does it matter was he says? I want to know if a Republican on the Judiciary COmmittee who might vote for Obama's pick says no, or a Republican not on the committee who makes noises about voting for the eventual nominee on the floor. That's news. Sen. Hatch is one of the most partisan guys in the Senate, and that is saying something. He knows how to ask softball questions when it is a Republican nominee and he thinks he knows how to ask tough questions when it is a Democratic nominee.

Appearantly, Conservative activists like Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts are OK to Sen. Hatch. Let's look at what an "Activist Judge" is supposed to mean: someone that disreggards public will and publicly elected officials policy decisions to substitute their ideological views in that place. So since both of these catholic men have made it to the high court, what have they done?

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.

• Ledbetter v. Goodyear, where the conservative faction read into the statute a time limitation to sue for sex discrimination, even if you don't learn that you got stiffed by your your employer until years afterwards.
• The Louisville and Seattle cases, where two school districts tired to progressively diversify their schools at the choice of their local communities, and Roberts et al overturned them
• Overturned decades and decades of precedent on arbortion rights to protect the health of the mother (including a case a few years earlier which nixed a nearly identical law), to dissregard the health of the mother.
• D.C. v. Heller, where the court decided, for the first time since the creation of the second amendment, that there is an individual right to bear arms. That's right, never before in 220 years had a court held that there was a right to bear arms, even if the public believed that it existed.
• Ricci where the Court made up a new standard to ensure a white guy won (and embarressed incoming Justice Sotomayor to the delight of Fox News) where the New Haven had remade a test after no minorities passed it.
• Citizens United v. F.E.C., wherein the Roberts court overturned 102 years of precedent to hold that those poor corporations shouldn't be constrained from advertising for and against elected officials. Because when Massy Coal CEO Don "mining accident" Blankenship wanted to avoid a multi-million judgment, and he bought himself a West Virginian Sumpreme Court Justice, that was a good thing for democracy.

I could go on, but you get the picture. The point is, the next time a conservative rattles on about "activist judges," you should say, "You mean Roberts and Alito?"