Schumer to fight new Bush high court picks

The Politico

New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a powerful member of the Democratic leadership, said Friday the Senate should not confirm another U.S. Supreme Court nominee under President Bush “except in extraordinary circumstances.”...

...Earlier this week, Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, said he was persuaded by a conversation with Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who spoke with Specter at the Aspen Institute gathering in Colorado this month, to study the decisions of the Roberts Court. The term that ended in June was notable for several rulings that reversed or chipped away at several long-standing decisions, delighting conservatives but enraging liberals.

Breyer has publicly raised concerns that conservative justices were violating stare decisis, the legal doctrine that, for the sake of stability, courts should generally leave precedents undisturbed.

“It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much,” Breyer said, reading his dissent from the bench in June to a 5-4 ruling that overturned school desegregation policies in two cities.

What is so sacred about stare decisis??? I wish somebody would ask these liberals that since they are such big fans of stare decisis, one has to assume that they would have been okay with upholding racial discrimination laws that were on the books during the late 1800s into the 1900s. Those laws were on the books for years before the Supreme Court overturned them. I guess liberals would have said, "We can't overturn these laws because of stare decisis." Give me a break...

With regard to Breyer being upset that the court overturned school desegregation policies in two cities, the cases had to do with these two cities forcing parents to send their kids 90 minutes across town to go to school when they had a school a few blocks down the road from where they lived.