Question: Can a police officer pull a driver over on suspicion of drunk driving based only on an anonymous tip? Based on the quotations below, can you guess what governmental body was asked this week to answer that question?

Every year, close to 13,000 people die in alcohol-related car crashes - roughly one death every 40 minutes. ... Ordinary citizens are well aware of the dangers posed by drunk driving, and they frequently report such conduct to the police. A number of States have adopted programs specifically designed to encourage such tips ...

[Another lawmaking body] adopted a rule that will undermine such efforts to get drunk drivers off the road. [It] commands that police officers following a driver reported to be drunk do nothing until they see the driver actually do something unsafe on the road - by which time it may be too late.

There is no question that drunk driving is a serious and potentially deadly crime ... The imminence of the danger posed by drunk drivers exceeds that at issue in other [situations]. In a case [with an anonymous tip that someone at a bus stop is carrying a gun], the police can often observe the subject of a tip and step in before actual harm occurs; with drunk driving, such a wait-and-see approach may prove fatal. Drunk driving is always dangerous, as it is occurring. ...

The conflict is clear and the stakes are high. The effect of [needing more than an anonymous tip to permit the police to stop a driver] will be to grant drunk drivers "one free swerve" before they can legally be pulled over by police. It will be difficult for an officer to explain to the family of a motorist killed by that swerve that the police had a tip that the driver of the other car was drunk, but that they were powerless to pull him over, even for a quick check.

Is this a legislator urging his colleagues how to vote on an important policy question?

No. It's Chief Umpire John Roberts, and he's not exactly neutrally calling balls and strikes.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court denied a petition for certiorari in Virginia v. Harris, declining to hear the appeal of a drunk driving case involving a police stop based only on an anonymous tip. Roberts, joined by Justice Scalia, issued a stinging dissent from that decision not to hear the case. Their dissent was brimming with ... policy considerations.

This blog has written before on the pernicious myth that judges shouldn't affect policy, pointing out that that's exactly what courts are supposed to do. It's inherent in interpreting the law in difficult cases. Yet part of the Far Right's propaganda to demonize liberal judges and portray them as anti-American is the line that they "legislate from the bench," usurping policymaking powers from the people's elected representatives.

No one should be fooled into buying the Right's framing. Progressives shouldn't be bullied into parroting it. And the press needs to start asking why the Right always remains silent when conservative jurists engage in this perfectly normal, long-accepted practice.

The Right regularly attacks progressive judges for "making policy" and "legislating from the bench." But in oral arguments yesterday, the Supreme Court Justices demonstrated yet again that one of their most important roles is to make policy in difficult circumstances where the law is unclear.

The case involves a man named José Padilla who was born in Honduras and has lived in America for 40 years. (He is no relation to the former "enemy combatant" of the same name). Considering whether to plead guilty to trafficking in marijuana, he turned to his lawyer for advice. Relying on the lawyer's incorrect assertion that a guilty plea would not affect his immigration status, he pled guilty and now finds himself subject to deportation.

The Court must decide if Padilla was unconstitutionally deprived of effective assistance of counsel and should therefore be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea. During oral argument, Justices across the ideological spectrum appropriately asked probing questions as they wrestled with difficult policy options. The Washington Post reports:

Justice Sonia Sotomayor ... said the threat of deportation was an important component of a defendant's decision on whether to go to trial and risk a longer sentence, or plead guilty to a charge that would automatically send him back to a place where he "might starve to death."

But other justices worried that it would be impossible to limit the issue to deportation -- a tack that Padilla's attorney Stephen B. Kinnaird suggested was one way to narrowly decide the case.

"We have to decide whether we are opening a Pandora's box here, whether there is any sensible way to restrict it to deportation," said Justice Antonin Scalia. "What about advice on whether pleading guilty would -- would cause him to lose custody of his children? That's pretty serious. What if pleading guilty will -- will affect whether he can keep his truck, which is his main means of livelihood, or whether -- whether it would be seized by the government as the instrument of his crime?"

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. said he was sympathetic to Padilla's predicament. "Your argument has an appeal because removal is such a harsh consequence, particularly for someone like your client, who had been in the United States for a long time," he said. But he wondered how to ever know whether such a conversation had occurred between client and attorney.

Clearly, deciding difficult cases like this is not as easy as simply calling balls and strikes.

I look forward to hearing those who vigorously complain about "legislating from the bench" condemn Justices Scalia and Alito for yesterday's questions.

I also look forward to seeing exactly what process they propose the Justices use to call this a ball or a strike.

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Salazar v. Buono, a case involving the display of a cross on top of Sunrise Rock in the Mojave National Preserve, which is federal property. (People For the American Way Foundation joined an amicus brief in this case filed by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and other religious and secular non-profits).

By now, you've probably read about Justice Scalia's angry response when a Jewish lawyer had the audacity to point out that Jews don't use Christian crosses to honor their dead.

Mr. Eliasberg [the ACLU Foundation attorney] said many Jewish war veterans would not wish to be honored by "the predominant symbol of Christianity," one that "signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins."

Justice Scalia disagreed, saying, "The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead."

"What would you have them erect?" Justice Scalia asked. "Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David and, you know, a Muslim half moon and star?"

Mr. Eliasberg said he had visited Jewish cemeteries. "There is never a cross on the tombstone of a Jew," he said, to laughter in the courtroom.

Justice Scalia grew visibly angry. "I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead," he said. "I think that's an outrageous conclusion."

When I read this, my mind immediately went to … crayons. Yes, crayons.

When I was five, I had a somewhat peach-colored crayon that Crayola called "flesh." I'm white, and the crayon was close to my own skin color. It didn't occur to me that Crayola was assuming that all people are white. I didn’t need to think about it – After all, I was part of the majority. Later on, of course, I realized how this nomenclature marked African Americans as other, as outsiders in our society.

But not everyone who is a member of the in group has the capacity to understand what it is to be on the other side. Justice Scalia certainly doesn't.

For Justice Scalia, the cross has never had anything but positive connotations. From the perspective of his life experience, how could a cross grave marker be anything but an honor?

But in the history of America, Jews and other non-Christians have experienced the cross at times as neutral, and at times as a symbol of exclusion and persecution. Yet when someone points out that Jews do not see the cross as a symbol of honor, Justice Scalia gets angry.

In analyzing how the law impacts people, a wise judge considers people who are different from himself. A wise judge has empathy. Justice Scalia has none.

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Maryland v. Shatzer, a case involving the constitutional right to counsel during police questioning. The questions asked by the Justices – even the most conservative of them – exposed one of the great lies the Far Right tells about our nation’s judiciary: that courts should not make policy.

In 1981, the Court held that once you tell the police that you want your lawyer, the questioning must stop either until your lawyer arrives, or you yourself initiate further communication. This rule protects you from being badgered by the police to change your mind before the lawyer shows up.

In 2003, after Michael Blaine Shatzer asked for a lawyer, the police dropped their investigation and released him from their custody. Three years later, new evidence arose in the case. The rule established in 1981 would suggest that the police were still barred from questioning Shatzer. That was the issue before the Court this week. To help them analyze the case, the Justices asked the sorts of hypothetical questions they often ask. The Washington Post reports:

Justices seemed generally supportive … that police should have been allowed to question Shatzer again, but they had a hard time agreeing on how the rule should be changed.

[Chief Justice] Roberts worried that police could repeatedly question and dismiss a suspect who asks for a lawyer. "You know, just sort of catch-and-release, until he finally breaks down and says, 'All right, I'll talk,' " Roberts said. ...

[T]he justices wondered what could be done about a suspect who asks for a lawyer, never actually receives one or is convicted, and then is questioned years later, perhaps for a different crime.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. posed this hypothetical: What if someone was arrested for joy riding in Maryland, invoked his Fifth Amendment protection, and was never convicted? Could police in Montana question him as a murder suspect in Montana 10 years later?

When [Shatzer’s attorney] said no, Alito replied: "And you don't think that's a ridiculous application of the rule?"

[Then] Alito raised the hypothetical ante to a crime committed 40 years later ...

If the police let a suspect go after he asks for a lawyer, does the Constitution prohibit the police from questioning him again half a century later? Should there be limits? What should they be? How do you decide?

The Justices deciding this case are not simply calling balls and strikes, the insulting umpire analogy that Roberts infamously used during his confirmation hearings. Roberts, Alito, and the other Justices are weighing the consequences of different possible interpretations of the 1981 precedent as they apply it to a new and unforeseen situation.

Just as legislators do, they will be making policy. And that's fine. That's what courts are supposed to do. It's inherent in interpreting the law in difficult cases such as this.

So the next time the Washington Post quotes a right wing propagandist condemning progressive judges for making policy or "legislating from the bench," perhaps the Post will do more than collaborate by simply reprinting the accusation. Perhaps the Post will cite its own reporting and point out that all judges weigh policies and make law, but that the Far Right is silent when conservative judges do it.

Today, the Supreme Court is hearing oral argument in the case of Salazar v. Buono, a case involving the display of a cross on top of Sunrise Rock in the Mojave National Preserve, which is federal property. A former employee of the Preserve sued in federal court challenging the legality of the display, arguing that the religious symbol violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.  The district court agreed and ordered that the display be taken down.  So far, so good.

But in order to sidestep the ruling, Congress swapped Sunrise Rock—but none of the land around it—with a private party who agreed to maintain the cross.  Buono asked the Court to enforce its order prohibiting the display of the cross and also asked the court to prohibit the land swap.  The court agreed as to both and on appeal to the 9th Circuit, the district court’s order was upheld.

People For the American Way Foundation joined a brief filed by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State and other religious and secular non-profits on behalf of Buono to point out that objections to such religious displays on public land are more than the just general grievances.  Rather, the effects of an unconstitutional government display of religion inflict real and significant harm that cannot be easily ignored. 

Government-sponsored religious symbols are potent forms of speech that can have real, palpable effects on people who are subjected to them. The harm from them is not that they evoke mere distaste, displeasure, or even disgust. It is that they deprive citizens of the use and enjoyment of public lands, because using a public facility where the government has chosen to erect a monument to one faith stigmatizes nonadherents as second-class citizens, while demeaning the faith of adherents by coopting what is sacred.

Also, these harmful effects cannot be fixed by a contractual land transfer of a particular parcel of land, particularly when the parcel is entirely enclosed within a federal preserve and where the government has taken no steps to disassociate itself from the display[].  Nothing was done at all to make it clear that the display is no longer on government land.  As such, the transfer cannot be seen as anything other than a cheap strategy designed solely to preserve the display of the cross.  Allowing a scheme like that to cure the unconstitutionality of a government act wouldn’t correct the wrong—it would perpetuate it.

Exhibit A from last term of the Roberts Court's conservative judicial activism is the Gross age discrimination case where the Court, in an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, reached out to decide an issue that hadn't been briefed and changed the law in a way that will make it much harder for older workers to prove that they were discriminated against in the workplace. Today, three key Democratic leaders, Senators Tom Harkin and Patrick Leahy and Rep. George Miller, announced plans to introduce a bill to correct the Court's error. As noted in the coverage of the announcement, this is the second time in a year that Congress has reached out to correct the court, the first being the Lilly Ledbetter legislation, the first measure signed into law by President Obama in January of this year.

As discussed in a number of previous posts, the Roberts Court has demonstrated its conservative ideological bent, striking down laws passed by Congress and demonstrating a willingness to ignore long-standing precedent. It reached out last term in the Gross age discrimination case to decide an issue that hadn't been briefed and changed the law in a way that will make it much harder for older workers to prove that they were discriminated against in the workplace. In the Ricci fire fighters case, the Court reached out to decide the case on the merits - even though no employee had actually been injured -- so that it could reach the merits and change the law with respect to proving discrimination in so-called disparate impact cases. And, in the recently argued Citizens United case, the Court re-opened the briefing in the case to re-visit what had been a settled question about whether regulating corporate expenditures in candidate elections is constitutional.

Will this trend continue? And what does this mean for President Obama's initiatives on health insurance reform? Climate change? Financial regulatory reform? Asnoted in Adam Liptak's article in yesterday's New York Times, the Court's docket this term includes a number of cases likely to signal its future willingness to support government intervention to address structural problems in our economy. In Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, a case growing out of the Enron debacle, the Court will consider the scope of Congress' power to delegate regulatory responsibility to independent regulatory boards. The issue in Jones v. Harris Associates, concerns the role of courts in regulating executive compensation for mutual fund investment advisers. And in Milavetz, Gallop & Milavetz v. United States, the issue concerns the scope of a federal law concerning lawyers' advice to clients considering bankruptcy. Dry? Perhaps. But what we learn in these cases, may well signal how far the Court is willing to go in supporting or, perhaps more likely, frustrating, efforts by the Administration and Congress to address serious structural problems in our economy.

You think Justices' legal ideology matters? Stay tuned.

It's the first Monday in October, and that means another Supreme Court term is upon us. In addition to cases addressing church-state separation and First Amendment protections, the Court will be hearing a load of cases relating to business and finance that could have broad implications for all Americans.

The justices’ decisions will be closely watched at a time when, constitutional scholars say, Obama administration initiatives are generating fundamental questions about the structure and limits of government power that will, in short order, reach the court.

“There will be major ways in which these interventions will produce legal and constitutional issues,” said Michael W. McConnell, a former federal appeals court judge who is now director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center.

And these aren't even the kinds of business cases we're used to talking about with relation to the Court.

In recent terms, the business docket was studded with cases about employment discrimination, federal pre-emption of injury suits and the environment. With the exception of a single employment case, all of those categories are missing.

In their stead, important questions about bankruptcy, corporate compensation, patents, antitrust and government oversight of the financial system will confront the justices.

The writing is on the wall. As any number of commentators have suggested, it’s pretty clear that no matter whom the President nominates for the next Supreme Court vacancy, the Republicans and their allies on the far right are going to fight. Indeed, as Jeff Toobin points out in his excellent article in The New Yorker, even the President’s mainstream nomination of David Hamilton for a seat on the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals – his very first judicial nominee – continues to languish because of unfounded attacks from the Right. As one White House official is quoted by Toobin: ‘If they are going to stop David Hamilton, then who won’t they stop.” 

As suggested in Toobin’s article, the Republicans claim it’s payback for the President’s votes against Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito.  But as history is showing us, then-Senator Obama’s votes were the correct ones. The Roberts court is Exhibit A in far right judicial activism – not the balls and strikes umpiring we were promised by the Chief Justice.  In any event as Republican Senator Thune makes clear in yesterday’s Roll Call article, the only way for the President to avoid a fight is for him to nominate a conservative – anything else would meet significant resistance.

So the cards are on the table. If we’re going to have a fight, then let’s think boldly about the kind of Justice we need on the Court. And that means a Justice who understands that the law and the Constitution mandate protections for average Americans against the interests of the more powerful. It means a Justice who understands that the law and the Constitution protect important privacy rights. It means a Justice who appreciates that the law and the Constitution affect the realities of Americans’ everyday lives.  It means a Justice who respects the core constitutional values of justice and equal opportunity for all.  If we’re going to have a fight, let’s make it one worth having – let’s make it a fight for core constitutional values.

Jeffrey Rosen’s op ed piece in the New York Times over the weekend, The Trial of John Roberts, echoes a theme noted by a number of commentators, one on which I posted last week: that the Supreme Court’s decision to open up long-settled law with respect to regulating corporate expenditures in candidate elections in the recently argued Citizens United case is a quintessential exercise in judicial activism. And it’s the kind of judicial activism that then nominee John Roberts pretended to foreswear through his claims to be an umpire, simply calling balls and strikes.  

Where I part company from Rosen, however, is in his analysis that Chief Justice Roberts “deserves credit for trying” to forge a broader consensus on narrower grounds, citing, in particular, last term’s Voting Rights Act case.  The cynic in me says that the decision was 8-1 to uphold Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act and not 5-4 to overturn it, because the Chief Justice simply did not yet have the votes to do so. And Rosen’s reliance on greater unanimity on the Court with respect to upholding business interests – according to the Chamber 79% of these cases decided on margins of 7-2 better – is not, in my view, a reflection of Chief Justice Roberts’ forging consensus on narrow grounds. It’s a reflection of how conservative this Court really is, why the judicial philosophy of the next nominee to the Supreme Court really matters, and why it’s important to begin having that discussion now.