On Monday, in response to a complaint from the United States Department of Justice alleging that Governor Milorad “Rod” Blagojevich had solicited bribes and engaged in a massive conspiracy to commit fraud, the Illinois House voted 113-0 to begin impeachment proceedings. Blagojevich has not yet been indicted. On December 10th, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid [...]

Tony Mauro has a

The state of Louisiana and attorneys for Patrick Kennedy have filed petitions arguing whether or not the Court should rehear the landmark death penalty case as a result of research oversight. The original petition for rehearing can be found here. You can find the Petitioner’s brief in opposition of rehearing here, the Respondent’s brief in [...]

The folks over at the Sentencing Law and Policy blog (creatively named after a textbook published with the same name and written by the same authors) have broken the news of Federal District Judge Paul Cassell’s retirement. Ordinarily this wouldn’t be a major issue, but the WSJ law blog highlights the most important part of [...]

J. Scott Jennings, the 29-year old aide to Karl Rove, was forced to go in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee to testify about the US Attorney Scandal. As soon as I read the title to the New York Times article,”With Rove Absent, Aide Is Grilled by Senate Panel”, I knew it was going to [...]

I admit that I made a slight mistake in yesterday’s post about Snarlin’ Arlen and his attack on judicial independence- I asserted, without clarifiying, that there was nothing “a Senator can do to a Supreme Court Justice save for pushing for impeachment.” Some very intelligent people have been arguing that Congress can reign in these [...]

As I was doing research for a post about the latest Court-packing plan (suggestion?) and I stumbled across a rather interesting set of events. Here are the facts that I know: In March of 1937, the Democratic President Andrew Jackson was wrapping up his wildly divisive, eight-year Presidency. His hand picked successor, Martin Van Buren, [...]

Apparently Arlen Specter isn’t particularly happy with the recent Stare Decisis-related performances of Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito. I’m not exactly sure what he wants to do about it, but it looks like he just wants to take a look at past decisions and remarks from the two Justices and decide whether or not [...]

Tom Delay is still firing political missiles into the fray from his blog over at TomDelay.com. Today he posted about Congress’s pork-barrel spending and cited an article from the folks at FreedomWorks. Tom drew particular attention to a few earmarked items in the bill: $21.4 million for a program educating older adults on a healthy [...]

Poor Harry Reid. He went out on a limb and kept the Senate in session way longer than he had to and he got burned. By a vote of 52-47, the Senate rejected the vote for cloture which would have forced a vote on the Reed/Levin Amendment. I’ve been watching sporadically all night and the [...]