Category: So Now What?

For the sake of my own sanity, I maintain a certain intellectual and emotional detachment from the issue of George W. Bush’s nominations for the Supreme Court. Whoever gets appointed by this president and confirmed by this Senate is not going to be someone I agree with on much past the possible exception of where to order lunch. And I have to make my peace with that, because heck, these are the folks that got elected. I can’t quite figure out where the dividing line between an objectionable level of near-total disagreement and an acceptable level of near-total disagreement lies.

On the other hand, when it comes to Samuel Alito, there’s something about this story from the Washington Post that concerns me. Some Senators have raised questions about Alito’s decision not to recuse himself from two cases involving the company that manages his mutual funds and the company that serves as his broker, despite indicating that he would do so in his Senate questionnaire during his confirmation to the apellate court. Alito explains it by saying that he was “unduly restrictive” with his questionnaire answer. It may well be that there’s a harmless explanation for this, but right now, it’s one of those things that chips away my faith in the cofirmation process. So I figured I would write a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, who also happens to be my Senator. I’m posting it up here as part of the So Now What? collection.

Continue reading “Courting Conflicts?”

For once, voter apathy didn’t doom us to be subject to the whims of our lawmakers. Pennsylvania’s legislators, who set the world land speed record for greed several months ago by voting themselves a disgusting pay raise in the middle of the night after cutting funds to education, child care and other programs, finally faced the music and repealed the damn thing. You know why? Because it turns out the voters really did care.

This is a victory that comes about in large part because of the state’s newspapers. From the Philadelphia Inquirer to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and everywhere in between, editorial pages would not let the issue die and the public responded. I applaud the efforts of the media and hope they get the credit they deserve for keeping the issue in the public consciousness.

And now the obvious question: How do we harness this kind of power for more issues?