It startles me that Alito's day of nomination and day of approval intersect twice now with the parting legacy of King and Rosa Parks — and, unheralded, the very Warren Court that Alito has rued for its activism.

Coretta and Martin King's home was firebombed during the bus boycott that Parks and King launched. Parks and MLK worked together, you remember, in Montgomery to stop the practice of separate rows on buses for black and white riders.  GW Bush acknowledged MLK and Parks together on the birthday of MLK 2 weeks ago, and Coretta in Tuesday's SOTU.

And Bush picked the same day Rosa Parks' body was brought to lie in state at the Capitol to nominate and laud Sam Alito to be the next S.Court justice.  Alito dutifully paid a visit to the rotunda to show respect for Rosa Parks. What neither man said in their remarks that day makes a stunning sin of omission:

Rosa Parks' struggle bore its fruit on the day, a full year after her arrest, that the "activist" Warren Court decided Browder v. Gayle and ordered an end to separate seats on buses, in the winter of 1956.

Bill Frist (R-TN) with Alito at the Rotunda 10.31.2005

The GOP unabashedly used minority-filibuster votes to stop 2 advise-and-consent nominees of President Clinton.

Republicans Hatch, Trent Lott, and then majority leader Bob Dole joined the filibusters.

A lot less was at stake then than the balance of power for a generation.

View the senators' votes in the Roll Calls here >>

Fatal filibuster (GOP led) #1 -    Henry FOSTER for Surgeon General and head of the US Public Health Service

Foster  - was defeated by a minority-number of votes in 1995

                Though 57 members voted to proceed to a vote
        43 GOP senators nixed it.   Here is the roll call.

 

Access the official roll call listing here.

    Henry Foster was strongly anti-tobacco. He did not believe in forbidding abortion.

    Because he held these views, a 43-person minority defeated the nomination.

He was blocked by 2 identical filibuster roll-calls.

After the 57/43-vote defeat, the position remained VACANT FOR 3 years.
  =======

Fatal filibuster     #2 - May 25, 1994 >>

The Democrats do not have to show a full 41 votes to slow this train down.  The burden is on Bill Frist to round up 60 affirmative votes to proceed to confirm a nominee.

UPDATE: Late day news – Durbin, Reid, Feinstein, Wyden are switching now to vote No on cloture come Monday.

The magic number is 60, not 41, on Monday. Nearly all recent judicial nominees, for lower court and SCOTUS, gained this level of support, either for cloture or for the actual nomination.

It is rare for a court nominee to prevail with less than 60 "yeas."  If some Democrats would rather abstain than vote no for cloture, then Frist has to pull together a bipartisan consensus for this nominee, as many prior appointees have needed in the past.

Here's an example. In '93, the motion to move to a vote for Clinton's nominee Assistant AG Walter Dellinger failed because it had 59 votes, not 60, even though there were only 39 (Republican) nay votes to deny cloture.

The Republican's successful filibuster of Dellinger held for 2 successive cloture votes.

The Dems needed to drum up more support for the nominee.

President Bush said on Monday, MLK and Rosa Parks "roused the dozing conscience of a complacent nation."

Martin Luther King Jr worked with Parks in Montgomery, you remember, to stop the practice of separate rows on buses for black and white riders.


But Bush forgot to tell us this.  It was the "activist" Warren Court that ordered an end to separate seats on buses in the winter of 1956 — fully one year after Rosa Parks' arrest in Alabama.

We praise MLK.

Alito even visited Rosa Parks' casket as she was lying in state on the day he was nominated, October 31. For all the homage paid to Rosa, neither Bush nor Alito in their remarks that day —or since— paid notice to the role of the Supreme Court in the Rosa Parks story.

Would a Justice Samuel Alito have ruled in her favor in 1956?  Does he rule for the underdog?  [Note:  This is a SCOTUS diary cleverly disguised as an MLK-Parks diary.]

Not mentioned by either man that day:  The Supreme Court in 1956 had Rosa Parks' back.

The cases where Judge Alito took a stand show an incredibly low regard by him for the benefits, rights and safety of working men and women.  These examples  >>

1. Retirement and pension case.

This is important to retiring workers. In DiGiacomo v. Teamsters Pension Trust Fund [pdf], the 3rd Circuit Court found that a Teamster driver, who had worked from 1960 and 1971 and then from 1978 onward, should be duly credited for the time he worked before 1971 in calculating his pension.  (The judges, most of them, based their ruling on an interpretation of the federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) which bars a forfeiture of benefits due to a break in service.)

     Sam Alito wrote a lone dissent that would sacrifice the worker's retirement to deny him the credit of his earlier 11 years of work – by virtue of Alito's anti-worker interpretation of the ERISA law.

Note. The above was written up first by NathanNewman, who I link to below.  This post is written in words close to Newman's writing, not my own original. I'm reposting it here, to get ahead of Monday's hearings.

In a razor-close contest in VA, a state Court has supervised, and certified, a so-called "recount" of the race for Attorney General.

Did the voting machine in your city tally your ballot
— or did it count you out?

    Recount Starts, but Without Va. Ballots  Wash. Post

The recount in the race for Virginia attorney general began yesterday ... but because of rules set by a three-judge panel overseeing the process very few votes were actually recounted.

     It is "only a reverification and a checking of the paperwork," said Rob Moses of the Loudon county Democratic Committee.

Two court rulings kept 25% of the ballots, the optical-scan ones, from being looked at or refed through the tally machines.  The candidates were separated by less than 1/50th of a percent, or 323 votes of 2 million cast.

Many of the votes were tallied on a scanner model named the Optech III-PE. The III-PE recently lost its certification in North Carolina and created counting problems in Colorado — where a review of ballots flipped 2 races after it found bunches of marked ballots were skipped over by machines.

California's secretary of state Bruce McPherson is close to re-certifying the Diebold touchscreen TSx machines, the very ones he barred from use a few months earlier.

On the state's website, you can see the report of a consultant McPherson hired, dated Nov. 11, that concludes Diebold's submission (as revised) now "meets current standards for use in California" — with a couple of "caveats."

Are you ready for this?

Diebold is under a court order from a Calif. court to upgrade security after the plaintiffs (Bev Harris and programmer Jim March) successfully sued to shine a light on the naked vulnerabilites of its voting machines.

The SoS's consultant [Steven V. Freeman] notes the court order requires what he calls a "Windows secure setup" (p. 1 of report):

"When we tested the use of GEMS under this [updated] configuration, all changes worked effectively except the stopping of Remote Access Connection Manager and Telephony.

Investigating, we determined that the Microsoft default startup was restarting these automatically and a script to edit the Windows Registry was needed to terminate the automatic start."   -->

Separate seating by race on the Montgomery buses did not end until 382 days after Rosa Parks had her day (and lost) at city court.

A federal court order from SCOTUS overturning the local ordinances reached Montgomery December 20, 1956 —  more than a year after Parks held onto her seat.  On that day finally, the longrunning boycott of Montgomery buses was called off, and black and white people could begin to sit in the same row on a city bus.

The defiance of Rosa Parks and 4 other women set off a yearlong rancorous legal battle that ended at the Supreme Court.

Following a year of civil disobedience in Montgomery, the Supreme Court struck down the city's segregated bus law.   The case was Browder v. Gayle, named for plaintiff Aurelia Browder and for the defendant, Montgomery mayor WA Gayle.

Here's some activist court history to contemplate as Bush sets nominates another judge who "isn't an activist" and Rosa Parks' body lies in state at the US Capitol rotunda.

Parks was arrested by the city of Montgomery for defying a local ordinance that required her to give up her seat for a white man riding her bus.

Here's the marker of the crime; someone nailed it up at an Austin street corner last year.              

   

"R. I. P.              Democracy,                Killed by Tom DeLay on this spot "           (Click here, for a larger image.)        Seen at the Corner of 38th and Ronson in Austin,        winter 2004

               ==========

Think about this   >> The ONLY gains made in the US House of Reps in 2004 by Republicans were 5 seats in Texas – handed over by DeLay's engineered redistricting. Not a single other House seat across the country.
               ==========

Oh, and it seems the political appointees at DoJ overruled the staff and won't release the voting rights memo. -->> Jump below to DoJ withholds memo from plaintiffs.

This is bizarre.

You may not know that the Sequoia Voting Systems company was sold in March (for a song, $16 million) to a Venezuelan-owned company -- Smartmatic.  The new US headquarters is in Boca Raton.   DeLaRue, the former owner, just cashed out of Sequoia at a loss.

And stranger still, last week our government denied permission for Sequoia's new CEO Antonio Mujica to return to the US.

Our embassy in Venezuela has revoked his visa. (Presumably, the company's president Jack Blaine is still allowed on US soil.)

So, it seems the supplier of US voting machines (one of the three largest makers) is being run by a man who the US doesn't trust to enter the country!

What can we make of this?

Voting machines are being undersupplied in heavily Sunni provinces, according to Reuters.  Well actually it's not the machines themselves, it's the polling centers that contain them that are missing.  An absense of ballots (called "voting sheets") is mentioned, too.

Here, we do it differently. We re-district, so voters' old polling places no longer have their registered records.

In Iraq, it's not so subtle.
Oh, and we've bombed out bridges for mobility too -->

nexus scandal, which was all about undue access for, and huge payments ($23 M) to, Texas lottery lobbyist Ben Barnes because of the favors he had done for Bush [and what Barnes knew from then] in an earlier decade?  Miers was lottery commissioner from 1995 to 2000.

The Houston Chronicle on Nov. 17, 2004    recapped the events surrounding Gtech when the Chronicle covered Miers' appointment to WH Counsel -

The Commission did vote in 1997 for a renewal of GTech's contract instead of following lower bids.

By the way, I never troubled myself much with the hullaballou about Barnes helping Bush gain entrance ...

Dear senator,

Moderate senators of both parties are walking into a vote trap on nominee Roberts.

• The AP reports [quoting Specter, Frist and Reid] that Bush is poised to make his next nomination right after the confirmation of Roberts –  but is holding back until then.  
  
  That means one thing.   If you learned Bush's choice before the vote, you would know the 2 nominees together will swing the court further to the right, and a lot of you would not give a thumbs up to Roberts.

• Once you vote yes on the nominee for whom:
  
  •  his SG work has been withheld
    
  •  his anti-abortion legal views are understood by his colleagues but not publicly committed
    
  •  who was unforthcoming in his testimony

  how will you possibly find reasons to oppose a similar nominee who is nearly but not quite as conservative as Roberts?  How would you oppose a Latino like Miguel Estrada, who would tip the balance even more, but will not send up any more flares than Roberts?

A "YEA" vote is a severe miscalculation by 45 Democratic senators on tactics -- and by 100 senators on the civil rights of Americans.

Where did John Roberts and Bill Rehnquist stand on "equal protection?"

     In 1983 ---

   Discrimination may be the central political theme in the legacy of Bill Rehnquist, chief justice, and his young protege Roberts —   culminating in the two's intertwined roles five years ago in crafting the legal premise for Bush v. Gore.  This has not been reported in the national press, only by the Miami Herald and the Florida newswire in July. More info below.

  —if they don't even try— there's a big problem.  It's a problem of strategy too.  They are miscalculating, badly.

Realize first that you don't get much more conservative, or more threatening, actually, to the protections of individual rights than with a nominee like John Roberts. (Oh sure, there's Janice Brown – but you know Bush/Rove will be smart enough to stay away from the guaranteed filibuster types, I'm pretty sure.)  And Roberts' papers have been withheld without consequence and without filibuster.  More than that, one file of his [Affirmative Action] has upped and walked away (WaPo) --after 2 lawyers (one from Miers' office, one from Gonzales' team) looked at them, removed them and supposedly returned them to the library.  (Identities of the lawyers are not being disclosed by the WH.)

So here's the problem if the Democratic senators let him thru without trying to mount a filibuster.  What if Bush nominates next a near-clone to Roberts? Someone who's almost as conservative as he, and moreso than Sandra Day.  What if it's someone like Miguel Estrada.  [flip]

The first VP to land in New Orleans was Al Gore, who chartered a rescue plane to medEvac Charity Hospital patients to Tennessee.  Gore declined interviews last weekend while he was shuttling the evacuees, but the doctors who flew with him talked about the experience.

Gore had to work around sequential blockade by FEMA and NDMS – which naturally denied his team permissions, repeatedly (after the flip).

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.(AP) - Al Gore helped airlift some 270 Katrina evacuees on two private charters from New Orleans, acting at the urging of a doctor who saved the life of the former vice president's son.

...    [Gore] refused to be interviewed about the mercy missions he financed and flew last Saturday and Sunday. . . .

On [Thurs] Sept. 1, three days after Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast, Simon learned that Dr. David Kline ... was stranded with patients at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

 

We are witness this week to the accumulated abandonment of initiative, decency, and compassion for the downtrodden in Louisiana – by our US government.

With this as backdrop I want you to have info, that John Roberts over the years has belittled and frustrated the aspirations of minorities, the strivings of women and the needs of the handicapped.

So offensive are his remarks and positions, it is not surprising that his Affirmative Action file has up and disappeared from the archives. (It vanished after 2 Bush admin lawyers, checked it out for review, and supposedly they returned it).

The editor of the Delta (Miss.) Democrat Times, who is a caucasian man, not an African-American, sees Roberts as:

  "a protector of white guys everywhere."

These groups have stood up to oppose Roberts as nominee :

  The National Coalition for Disability Rights.
  NAACP  Legal Defense Fund
   National Partnership for Women & Families
  Mexican American Legal Defense + Educational Fund
  National Women's Law Center
  The Alliance for Justice

More at the jump  -->

First in May, when a Cessna entered DC airspace unannounced, it required military escort and decision-making, and the evacuation of Congress and the White House. Nevertheless, the President was only informed nearly an hour after the rest of us, who were following the plane's course (that is, after the plane left restricted airspace).

Now this week, in a regional disaster, almost nothing gets deployed for 5 days.

In fact, greater assistance to La. was blocked, discouraged, and declined (See Mayor Daley's initiative last Sunday to send 100s of firefighter, medical assist and police personnel. FEMA told Daley No, and so far has accepted a single truck from Chicago, as of Friday.)

Now here's what a President with command and control could do right at the start:

HE WOULD Ask/decide --  WHAT do we have for New Orleans?  Transport.  Water.  MREs.  Move it there - now!

HE WOULD Ask/decide -- What DON'T we have? What's not happening.  Power, communications, transport, water. Move it, Deploy it, get it there.  Buses  --->  There. Convoys. Radios.

I will present a scenario.