Herb Kohl Quotes
Judicial excellence requires candor before confirmation. We are being asked to give the nominee enormous power.
United States, Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary. Confirmation Hearings on the Nomination of Samuel A. Alito, Jr. to Be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Government Printing Office, 2006, p. 22.
He served on a Supreme Court that was as close to political as any had ever been. Hence his great concern.
This is the most formalized and sophisticated compendium of laws of the so-called “barbaric peoples” of Europe. The compilation was in many ways a documentation of the traditional laws of the Visigoths that had evolved over hundreds of years.
When Cardozo was appointed to the Supreme Court, there was much anti Semitism in America and few Jews were made judges or magistrates. He was reviewing a case where the magistrate had been guilty of misconduct. The magistrate also happened to be Jewish. Cardozo thought that Jewish judges in particular should always maintain very high standards. This has been a common reaction of minorities who reach high level positions. They hold their fellow minority members to a higher standard so as to prove that the prejudice was undeserved. Of course there are good and bad in every group, but these first ethnic pioneers feel like they are carrying the burden for their entire minority group.
Scalia had been a close friend of the Vice President. He had recently been taken on the Vice President’s plane and they went duck hunting.
The judiciary in the American system must give deference to the executive and legislative branches and interfere only when there is a violation of the Constitution. Many of the laws may well be viewed as bad policy by the judge, or in some case, may be unjust. The judge however cannot interfere just because he is dealing with bad or unjust laws. So Judge Scalia points out that the judge functioning properly in the American system will find that he personally does not like the consequences of his own opinions.
In his boisterous dissent he read from the bench in the EPA v. EME Homer City case, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, made a mistake and in citing a previous opinion he had written, he made an error recalling what he had written previously. Critics of the justice not only castigated him but made fun of his seemingly foolish error that a law student should not make. Whalen’s quotation is important because it illustrated the highly partisan tone in American politics at that. Whalen, a partisan conservative explains how he would do the same thing if a liberal judge made a mistake. The error was corrected in the final published version of the opinion, and it did not affect the logic of the dissent or even the factual arguments for the dissent. Yet the quest for partisan advantage and trashing a political opponent was so in vogue that a minor mistake was treated as a major political scandal. The end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st were not the most partisan and nasty era of American politics but it was one of the worst.
Herbert H. Kohl is an American businessman and politician. Alongside the help of his brother and father, the Kohl family created the Kohl's department stores chain and Kohl went on to be president and CEO of Kohl's. Kohl is a former United States Senator from Wisconsin and a member of the Democratic Party. Kohl is also the former owner of the Milwaukee Bucks of the National Basketball Association. He chose not to seek re-election in 2012 and was succeeded by fellow Democrat Tammy Baldwin.
