{"id":234492,"date":"2016-03-29T10:49:26","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T10:49:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=234492"},"modified":"2016-03-29T10:49:26","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T10:49:26","slug":"obama-high-court-pick-merrick-garland-record-support-police-powers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/obama-high-court-pick-merrick-garland-record-support-police-powers\/","title":{"rendered":"Obama high court pick Merrick Garland: A record of support for police powers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Via WSWS<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
Tom Carter<\/h5>\n

In the roughly two weeks since President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the US Supreme Court, a picture has emerged of a former prosecutor who consistently upholds the police powers of the state.<\/p>\n

Appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1995, the 63-year-old Garland has earned a reputation as a judicial \u201ccentrist,\u201d a term that in the contemporary context signifies an accommodation to corporate interests and the curtailment of democratic rights.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s nominee is by most accounts the most conservative of the judges said to have been on his \u201cshort list\u201d of possible nominees. Near-term political considerations in advance of the November elections clearly played a significant role in Obama\u2019s pick to succeed the long-time leader of the right-wing bloc on the Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, who died suddenly last month. With the Republican leadership in Congress vowing to block a vote on Scalia\u2019s replacement until after the election, Obama chose a federal appeals court judge who had been broadly backed and even praised by prominent Republicans.<\/p>\n

Garland\u2019s judicial career parallels the rightward trajectory of the American judiciary over the past two decades, and especially since the launch of the so-called \u201cwar on terror\u201d in 2001. He has endorsed the authoritarian theory of \u201cdeference\u201d to the executive, according to which executive agencies are presumed to be acting reasonably and lawfully.<\/p>\n

As a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Garland joined an antidemocratic decision that deferred to the Bush administration regarding the rights of detainees at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The New York Times<\/em>\u2019 Adam Liptak admitted, \u201cHe has been notably deferential to executive agencies and is seen as reluctant to second-guess experts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Before becoming a judge, Garland worked for the Justice Department as an associate deputy attorney general (a federal prosecutor), a fact touted by Obama in his nomination speech. On that occasion, Obama emphasized Garland\u2019s law-and-order background as a prosecutor who would \u201ctake no chances that someone who murdered innocent Americans might go free on a technicality.\u201d Here the term \u201ctechnicality\u201d is a code word for violation of constitutional due process.<\/p>\n

In 2003, while some of the most egregious forms of torture were being employed at Guantanamo Bay, Garland voted to throw out a lawsuit by prisoners at the camp challenging their detention without trial, effectively making Garland an accomplice in their illegal detention and torture from that point forward. In that case, Al Odah v. United States<\/em>, Garland sided with the Bush administration and ruled that the judiciary had no jurisdiction over the case and no authority to challenge the executive.<\/p>\n

After the Supreme Court\u2019s infamous Citizens United<\/em> decision in 2010 lifting restrictions on corporate donations in elections, Garland joined in a unanimous appeals court decision expanding the doctrines announced in that decision and facilitating the rise of \u201csuper PACs.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that case, SpeechNow v. Federal Election Commission<\/em> (2010), the DC Circuit reasoned that since the Supreme Court decided that corporate political spending in elections could not be corrupt, donations to fund spending by so-called \u201cpolitical action committees\u201d (PACs) could not be corrupt either. The SpeechNow<\/em> decision cited the Citizens United<\/em> decision 26 times.<\/p>\n

In Hatim v. Obama<\/em> (2014), Garland sided with the Obama administration in a case involving allegations that Guantanamo detainees were subjected to humiliating and vindictive genital probing before being allowed to meet with their lawyers, discouraging detainees from getting legal advice. Garland ruled that the genital searches were \u201creasonable security precautions.\u201d<\/p>\n

In Judicial Watch v. United States Department of Defense<\/em> (2013), Garland rejected a request for the Obama administration to release images of Osama bin Laden\u2019s reported burial at sea. This ruling asserted that the purpose of censoring the images was \u201cto prevent the killing of Americans and violence against American interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

One exception is a 2013 decision authored by Garland rejecting the Central Intelligence Agency\u2019s refusal to \u201cconfirm or deny\u201d the existence of records pertaining to its drone assassination program. The CIA had claimed that acknowledging the mere fact of the existence or nonexistence of the records would jeopardize national security.<\/p>\n

The CIA\u2019s legal position in that case was exceptionally spurious, even by the standards of 21st century American jurisprudence. \u201cNo reasonable person,\u201d Garland wrote, could make the CIA\u2019s argument \u201cwith a straight face.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the question of the criminal justice system, Washington Post<\/em> journalist Radley Balko noted, \u201cGarland may actually move SCOTUS [Supreme Court of the United States] to the right on criminal justice.\u201d In 2010, the New York Times<\/em> commented that \u201chis rulings suggest that he could be more of a center-right justice in matters of criminal law.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2008, for example, Garland sided with a cop who had allegedly performed an illegal search by unzipping a person\u2019s jacket without permission and without probable cause. In 2007, he justified a police search of a car as a \u201csearch incident to arrest,\u201d when the arrest had actually come after<\/em> the search. In 1999, he supported a prosecutor who had misrepresented critical evidence in closing arguments in a jury trial.<\/p>\n

With respect to the death penalty, Garland has claimed that the constitutionality of capital punishment is \u201csettled law.\u201d While he worked as a prosecutor, he personally \u201crecommended that the government seek the death penalty,\u201d according to the Times<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In the upcoming elections, the American people will be told once again that to defend democratic rights it is necessary to vote for Democrats who will appoint supposedly liberal judges. In that regard, it is instructive to consider the Supreme Court decision in Plumhoff v. Rickard<\/em> (2014). In that ruling, the court overrode the democratic rights of the family of a victim of police brutality and granted immunity to the police. The unanimous decision was authored by Bush appointee Samuel Alito and joined by both of Obama\u2019s Supreme Court appointees, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.<\/p>\n

The administration\u2019s March 16 announcement of the nomination of Garland has touched off back-and-forth posturing by prominent figures in the political establishment and the media. Obama and his fellow Democrats have denounced the Republicans as \u201cobstructionists\u201d for blocking consideration of Garland, calling it a violation of the Senate\u2019s constitutional responsibility to confirm or deny executive appointments. Far from claiming that the accession of Garland would end the generally reactionary trend on the high court, they are promoting him as a \u201cmoderate\u201d and \u201cconsensus\u201d pick and seeking to use his conservative credentials to embarrass prominent Republicans who previously backed him.<\/p>\n

The Republican position, no less cynical, is that Scalia\u2019s replacement will so decisively shift the balance on the Supreme Court that the American people should be given the opportunity to weigh in on the choice in the November elections before the Senate takes action.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Via WSWS. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission or license. Tom Carter In the roughly two weeks since President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to the US Supreme Court, a picture has emerged of a former prosecutor who consistently upholds the police powers of the state. Appointed to the bench by President […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-234492","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234492\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}