The next day, Georgetown University Law Center inaugurated its new endowed Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., Professorship, initially held by Prof. William Lazurus. Several years ago, GULC launched the Robert F. Drinan, S.J., Chair in Human Rights.

If “Catholics in Political Life” were required reading in a class on Catholic legal thought, the Brennan Professorship could make for an interesting final exam question: does the Conference’s guidance in CPL apply to dead people?

A good essay response would walk through the text of the USCCB’s statement: “The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.”
Georgetown University is a Catholic institution. Naming a professorship for a well-known public figure is an honor, whether or not conferred posthumously. Legislating abortion rights from the bench or supporting them in Congress violates fundamental Catholic and natural law moral principles. And although most honors are given to living people, the concepts of “honors” or “awards” and “those who violate” have no requirement based on the presence of a pulse
(President Obama has recently awarded both the Medal of Honor and the Presidential Medal of Freedom to deceased recipients).

Moreover, named professorships are just as susceptible to the “scandal” that this provision of CPL seeks to prevent. CPL’s goal is to stop Catholic institutions from placing the imprimatur of the Church on public figures in a way that legitimizes or excuses their wrong public conduct in the minds of the participants in the institution (in this case, especially students) and the community at large. Naming a chair for Justice Brennan or Fr. Drinan communicates
to students, faculty, alumni, and current public officials that morally wrong public decision-making on life issues is really no big deal – it’s just something we disagree on, but not something so significant that it affects our overall evaluation of a public career. To steal a line from another area of this debate, such an award says, “We’re personally opposed, but we don’t want to impose our morality on you by denying you this award you otherwise deserve.” But, for reasons
ably explained many times before on this blog, abortion IS a really big deal, a huge deal, and one that significantly shapes our evaluation of a person’s public service.

Thus, looking at both the words of and intent behind CPL, it should apply to a university chair named for a public figure when that person’s public work violates our fundamental moral principles.

The League of Women Voters Education Fund was the first petitioner to present to the Court at the October 28 hearing. Represented by Virginia Bartelt, a Middleton attorney, the League sought a recusal rule based on a $1,000 contribution. During the oral hearing on the matter, Justices David Prosser and Michael Gableman asked the League about its position on judicial elections (starts at about the 16 minute mark). Justice Gableman asked, “Has the League taken a position in general about whether justices ought to be elected or appointed?” The counsel for the League did not know, and so Justice Gableman asked if she would confer with the League’s executive director, who was present in the courtroom. Chief Justice Abrahamson invited her to the podium and she identified herself as Andrea Kaminski, Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin Education Fund. She said:

Ms. Kaminski: “The League has begun to invite some speakers because our member leagues – we have 17 leagues in the state – some of them expressed an interest in looking at the judicial independence issue. Legislatively, we support the Impartial Justice bill and we support issue ad regulation. We have invited some speakers to come and talk about the question of public financing for elections and also merit selection as options that are used in other states. However, the League has not changed its position supporting election of judges in our state, and justices.”
[The Chief asked how old that position is, and Ms. Kaminski responded, "I know that it is decades old."]
J. Gableman: “So is the League of Women Voters committed to the ability of the people to vote for judges?”
Ms. Kamiski: “Yes, we are.”

Later, Justice Prosser and the counsel and executive director had an exchange on the topic:

J. Prosser: “If the people in this room, and the people of Wisconsin, went to the website of the Wisconsin League of Women Voters, are you representing to the Court that there would not be anything on that website that indicates a preference for appointing judges and justices? Or at least justices? There’s nothing on that website?”
Ms. Kaminski: “There is nothing on that website to that effect.”

Today’s column by Ms. Kaminski on WisOpinion reiterated these points:

Some people suggest that the Citizens United ruling is one more reason to do away with election of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices and move to a “merit appointment” system of judicial selection. That is like throwing the baby away with the bathwater, when you consider that until 2007 most people would have said that our Supreme Court elections have worked very well since statehood in 1848.[*] Rather than take the vote away from citizens, let’s work to improve the elections.

So, I went to the website of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin: www.lwvwi.org. And I followed the “Position Papers” tab to “Administration of Justice,” and here’s what I found:

COURTS
Support of: …
A system which provides that judges be appointed on the basis of qualifications established by citizen review, and that they subsequently stand for election on their records. …
This position was adopted in 1957 and reviewed and reaffirmed in 1971. … The League unsuccessfully continued its support for a constitutional amendment providing for the selection of judges based on qualifications established by citizen review. The League has recommended the establishment of a citizen’s advisory review board to make recommendations to the governor for judicial appointments through a merit selection process. Some governors have chosen to do this, but there has been no effort to make this method a statutory requirement.

There may be a way to try to reconcile the League’s support for the status quo and “citizen advisory review” – Mrs. Kaminski makes a feeble attempt at doing so in her column by writing:

The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin Education Fund supports the current system in Wisconsin, in which justices may be appointed by the governor to fill vacancies and subsequently stand for election on their own records. This is the way most of our justices join the Supreme Court. It makes the Court accessible to qualified individuals who might never be able to mount a statewide campaign, and then it makes them accountable to the people.

First, though this could theoretically in a stretched way be reconciled with some statements on the website (i.e., the part about citizen advisory boards and making them statutory), it could not be reconcile with the League’s past support for a constitutional amendment to move to merit selection (the State Bar has supported amendment in the past as well).

Second, this is a gross mischaracterization of “the current system.” Though justices “may” be appointed by the governor, who “may” choose to use an advisory citizen commission, full terms on the Court can only be given by the people. Of the current seven justices, Justice Bradley won an open seat in 1995, Justice Crooks won an open seat in 1996, Justice Roggensack won an open seat in 2003, Justice Ziegler won an open seat in 2007, and Justice Gableman beat an incumbent in 2008. In other words, 5 of 7 faced the most rigorous kind of citizen review – election – to first join the Court, not gubernatorial appointment perhaps following partial screening by a hand-picked commission of political appointees.

In short, the League needs to sort out its own position on this issue. If it is committed to the current system of elections, then it should be so. If it is for merit selection, then it should be so. But this muddled middle ground, saying some things on its website, some things on WisOpinion, and some things to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and then twisting what each says to try to mesh with what was said before, should not continue.

*I have previously pointed out that this kind of statement is a canard – in recent memory, the 1999 race was a bruising contest, complete with editorial wailing and gnashing of teeth and calls for drastic reform.

Academics and liberals can argue all they want, the experience and preference of the American people has been conveyed through the polls, the election of Senator Scott Brown and the President’s approval rating.  It seems that now even an elected Canadian is weighing in on the matter, and it’s a strong show of support for the private sector.

Here is a quick excerpt on the matter from Wisconsin Senate Candidate, Terrance Wall (Original National Post Story, Big Government covered it as well):

“There is only one place in the world where it’s safe to be sick and that’s right here in America,” Wall said, “It’s clear that if they had a choice, Canadians would rather have the health care we enjoy here and not the government controlled system Russ Feingold supports.”

Don’t forget Sen.Russ Feingold’s ultimate goal:

In his column, Zweifel decries the “savagery” and “attacks” directed at Justice Butler, the “confirmation hell” that he has been forced to endure, the “misinformation and slimy attacks” he’s been subjected to during the confirmation process.

This argument has two flaws. First, it is wrong on the facts. This confirmation process has not been hellish, slimy, or savage, and the information has been accurate and on target. Objections raised by conservatives inside and outside the US Senate have focused entirely on Justice Butler’s public record, especially from his tenure on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. They have not been nasty or savage – they have been a specific critique of his public record and decisions.

Second, throughout the column decrying these allegedly nasty attacks he levels various epithets at conservatives: “far out,” “right-wing,” “made a fortune publishing the books of right-wingers,” “small-minded.”

Zweifel ends his column by saying, “It’s time the Senate Democrats call these people out.” Incidentally, this is the second time I’ve had to call Zweifel out for failing to practice the same civility he advocates.

All too often now, we await breathlessly the next month’s job creation/job loss number on the new or in the paper.  Heck, our President claims to save or create jobs (with our tax dollars mind you) but, when it comes down to those numbers are meaningless.  They used to mean something, when the government wasn’t such a trillion-dollar player in the economy thanks to the Democrat’s stimulus bill but, now jobs are created by the government at the cost of $134k a pop for “green energy” jobs or even more for some of the new Healthcare bureaucracies!

When the government creates jobs, most of them don’t add value, they manage paper, decide how to spend money, service taxpayers and generally are administrative dead weight that would be unnecessary if our government was much smaller and limited in the way our founding fathers meant it to be.

So here is what I would like to see from the Department of Labor:

Public Jobs Created/Lost  - The number of jobs lost, created or saved in the government or with taxpayer funds

Private Jobs Created/Lost – The number of jobs lost, created or saved in the private sector as a result of better business, more innovative products and American ingenuity.

GDP

I am going to hand this first part of this assessment off to the economist Capitian Capitalism:

“Understand the goal of economics is NOT to increase GDP, but rather to increase standards of living. We simply USE GDP as a measure of all the goods and services produced within an economy, ASSUMING those goods and services when consumed help increase our standard of living. That by eating the grapes we produce and watching the movies we produce, we get utility from that, enjoyment from it, and therefore we enjoy our lives more, thus increased standards of living.

This is a logical assumption in that typically, TYPICALLY, we produce what we want to consume. We produce things that are only going to benefit us. Nobody produces ebola for consumption on account that why would we? Nobody produces styrafoam dogs. Nor do we make our roads out of cake. It not only would not benefit us, it just plain doesn’t make sense.

However, this assumes an INCREDIBLY important assumption about how we go and produce things. We ASSUME that the free market is going to be in charge of what is produced. We assume that a free people, in control of their own money, is going to decide how many Big Macs we should make, how many I-Pods we should produce and how much sushi we should make. But what if this assumption is faulty?

The reason why it is faulty is the progressively less and less money is being spent by the people. A higher and higher percentage of our economy is being spent by the government. Going from essentially 3% of GDP in 1900 to 46% today.
…

GDP = Private Consumption + Government SPending + Investment +/-Trade Balance

it is a mathematical fact that these government spending plans will increase GDP, however they won’t increase standards of living simply because NO UTILITY IS BEING DERIVED FROM IT.”

So again, I would like to see a real metric with Government Spending removed from the equation above to truly understand our economic trend.

I doubt I will see these distinctions drawn on the nightly news anytime soon however.

The first big assumption is that every word said by an attorney automatically and verbatim represents the exact personal thoughts of the client. The Rules of Professional Conduct state that an attorney’s representation of a client does not constitute an endorsement of the client’s “views or activities” (SCR 20:1.2(b)). In a similar way, an attorney’s unscripted response to a reporter’s question should not be treated as though it came from the mouth of the attorney’s client as an exact representation of his personal thoughts on the matter. Justice Gableman has an extensive record of published opinions and statements made as a trial judge, statewide candidate, and justice that presents a far better reflection of his thinking than an unscripted answer to a reporter from his attorney.

Atty. Perlick-Molinari baldly asserts that the Justice has “an obvious and disgusting disdain for an entire group of litigants,” and assumes a negative answer to the question whether the Justice can be “fair” with such an attitude. Atty. Perlick-Molinari’s factual basis for this claim is a single word in quote marks five paragraphs earlier, taken from an unscripted response made by the Justice’s attorney to a question from a reporter. Although Atty. Perlick-Molinari says he is “not trying to take a political potshot [or] make a personal attack on the Justice,” he is making a very personal, judgmental, and aggressive claim based on very flimsy justification in the record.

The second pervasive assumption is that conservatives’ criticism targets the criminal defense bar for exploiting so-called loopholes. Admittedly, the television ad at issue in the WJC complaint focuses on then-Attorney Butler’s representation of a criminal defendant. However, the ad played into a much larger campaign theme focused on Justice Butler’s criminal justice decisions on the bench. The problem, in my book, lies with judges who create loopholes by twisting text, precedent, legislative history, social science, etc. Justice Butler, in decisions like Knapp, Dubose, Trujillo, McGrew, Shomberg, Johnson, and In re Jerrell CJ, reached beyond the relevant law (or dissented saying he would have) and created more expansive rights for criminal defendants. These decisions are a legitimate source of concern and complaint, and they are the primary target of criticism from conservatives.