Timely Appeal

Since Reagan's presidency, the federal judiciary has become increasingly conservative, ideological, and outcome-oriented--in favor of business as against consumers; employers as against employees; the government as against citizens; the government as against criminal defendants and appellants; and even (amazingly) corporations as against investors. At the top of the federal judiciary--the Supreme Court--the trend began with the nomination by Reagan and appointment by a Democratic-controlled Senate of Antonin Scalia. Conservative ideologue Clarence Thomas was sent to the Court--also via a Democratic-controlled Congress--by the first President Bush in 1991. With the confirmations of two more conservative ideologues in Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito in 2005 and 2006, respectively, the high Court has never in the last 80 years been as conservative. And in the short time in which they have had control, these four ideologues--aided by conservative Justice Kennedy (appointed by Reagan)--have the abandoned precedent to show for it. The end game is turn back the constitutional clock to the 1920's and even before. (For Scalia, in particular, it means turning it back to 1787, with the exception of the executive branch, for which strict construction and original intent have no apparent purchase.)

For lay persons, it is often difficult or even impossible to ferret out when a court of law is pulling a fast one or acting outside the bounds of established law. This is because judges and lawyers (the good ones, at least) are skilled in the art of making what does not fit appear to look like it does. Thus, an opinion that marks a sharp divergence from the law will be couched in language as though it were a natural extension of it, or even compelled by it. Absent any background, a lay person will easily find himself or herself reading a majority opinion and plainly understanding its reasoning and how it fits with the descriptions of the cited cases and then moving on to the dissenting opinion and feeling the exact same way about it. Although there are occassions in law where precedent and the facts at hand are such that cases plausibly may be made either way, one side is, more often than one would care to see, actually misrepresenting or mischaracterizing the facts or prior legal principles, or making persuasive-sounding--but ultimately empty and vapid--distinctions that allow them to reach a desired legal conclusion. (The jurisprudential notion that judges do not so much as interpret law as massage it to get where they want to go is called "legal realism," and most lawyers--and judges--are adherents, even if they deny they are.)

Timely Appeal will not be limited to the Supreme Court. In almost all instances, the federal courts of appeal are the real courts of last resort for most litigants, and the same trend that has occurred at the top has occurred in the lower federal courts and in state courts, albeit even faster and more radically. Here we hope to pierce the legal shield through which political operatives cloaked in black robes operate to deny you justice, on whatever bench they sit. Timely Appeal is an appeal to you to do something about it. We do not claim to know what, but anything from voting for a Democrat for President to a people's revolution sounds good to us. The choice is yours.