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You make the best argument for Gorsuch that I have heard regarding the frozen trucker case. If an employee can leave a company at will, why can't the company fire an employee at will. It may be a shitty thing to do, but that responsibility falls upon the company and not Gorsuch.

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ChuckyB..... you raise an important issue, namely the relationship between Law and Morality. Here is one explanation of the two:

"Law is an enactment made by the state. It is backed by physical coercion. Its breach is punishable by the courts. It represents the will of the state and realizes its purpose.

Laws reflect the political, social and economic relationships in the society. It determines rights and duties of the citizens towards one another and towards the state.

It is through law that the government fulfils its promises to the people. It reflects the sociological need of society.

Law and morality are intimately related to each other. Laws are generally based on the moral principles of society. Both regulate the conduct of the individual in society.

They influence each other to a great extent. Laws, to be effective, must represent the moral ideas of the people. But good laws sometimes serve to rouse the moral conscience of the people and create and maintain such conditions as may encourage the growth of morality.

Laws regarding prohibition and spread of primary education are examples of this nature. Morality cannot, as a matter of fact, be divorced from politics. The ultimate end of a state is the promotion of general welfare and moral perfection of man.

It is the duty of the state to formulate such laws as will elevate the moral standard of the people. The laws of a state thus conform to the prevailing standard of morality. Earlier writers on Political Science never made any distinction between law and morality.

Plato's Republic is as good a treatise on politics as on ethics. In ancient India, the term Dharma connoted both law and morality. Law, it is pointed out, is not merely the command of the sovereign, it represents the idea of right or wrong based on the prevalent morality of the people.

Moreover, obedi­ence to law depends upon the active support of the moral sentiments of the people. Laws which are not supported by the moral conscience of the people are liable to become dead letters.

I doubt this will clear up the issue. Many OPP'ers simply look at the law as the law. Period, end of story. Others, such as myself feel that sometimes a law does not reach a just conclusion, and that conscience and the interest of justice should take precedence. No easy answers here.

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No offense Jack, but I'm glad you are not being nominated to the Supreme Court.

You forget one little matter. Our Bill of Rights, specifically the 4th Amendment which is supposed to protect citizens against unreasonable searches and seizure. Roosevelt authorized the deportation and incarceration with Executive Order 9066, but the Supreme Court never ruled on the issue of the incarceration of U.S. citizens without due process.

A lot of things can be justified in the interest of "national security". We have been fighting the "war on terror" since 2001, and my guess is that it will never end. There will always be some real or imagined "boggyman" out there that will enable the government to justify any action. My concern is that Neil Gorsuch will be a very capable "enabler" of the next government crackdown on our personal freedoms. After all, if you can condone torture because it is the law, just what type of government law or behavior is out of bounds anymore?

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If you can send me a link from any youtube video where Pieczinik claims that Bush, Kissinger, or Chelsea Clinton are good, honest people, I will gladly reconsider anything that he has to say on this matter.

As to Al Franken, please don't confuse the message with the messenger. Just because Franken is a nutter, the facts in the frozen trucker case haven't magically changed. We know what happened, and how Gorsuch ruled, irrespective of the fact that Franken happened to be the one who pointed it out.

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Thank you. I could not have said this any better.

[quote=lindajoy]Of course, law and morality are inseparable and morality serves as the basis for any legal/political system.... it is our morality of something that fashions any decision we make ... a law is a moral claim, a moral imperative, a moral justification...

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If "law and morality are inseparable, and morality serves as the basis for any legal/political system...", than how should a judge rule when there is a conflict between the two?

Clearly there is a conflict if a law is created that allows torture of prisoners, or permits a company for firing an individual who is simply taking reasonable action to preserve his own life. To put blinders on and say, sorry, that is the law, disrespects the demands upon conscience which makes us all human.

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Politicians are also bought by the pharmaceutical Industry, the Oil Industry, the Banking and Financial Industry, the Dairy Industry, the Petrochemical Industry, Raytheon, Boeing, General Dynamics, Google, and on and on.......

Unless a way is found to take lobbying, and financial campaign contributions out of the mix, we will continue to have the best government that money can buy.

https://youtu.be/YZqJSBKLRHc

Last week, the U.S. Senate by a razor thin margin of 50 to 48 voted to take away the privacy rights of Internet users as a favor to the cable and telephone industry. Now the House is planning to take up this legislation in the next few days before people can discover the damage they are about to inflict to consumer privacy online.

These Are Our Legal Rights To Privacy They Are Dismantling

Americans have enjoyed a legal right to privacy from your communications provider under Section 222 of the Telecommunications Act for more than twenty years. When Congress made that law, it had a straightforward vision in how it wanted the dominate communications network (at that time the telephone company) to treat your data, recognizing that you are forced to share personal information in order to utilize the service and did not have workable alternatives.

S. J. RES. 34
JOINT RESOLUTION
Providing for congressional disapproval under chapter 8 of title 5, United States Code, of the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services”.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That Congress disapproves the rule submitted by the Federal Communications Commission relating to “Protecting the Privacy of Customers of Broadband and Other Telecommunications Services” (81 Fed. Reg. 87274 (December 2, 2016)), and such rule shall have no force or effect.

Passed the Senate March 23, 2017.

Call you House Representative and urge him to vote "No" on this resolution

https://www.popvox.com/us/federal/bills/115/sjres34

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Please explain to me how you interpret "final arbiter of the law" and "guardian and interpreter of the Constitution".

"EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW"-These words, written above the main entrance to the Supreme Court Building, express the ultimate responsibility of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Court is the highest tribunal in the Nation for all cases and controversies arising under the Constitution or the laws of the United States. As the final arbiter of the law, the Court is charged with ensuring the American people the promise of equal justice under law and, thereby, also functions as guardian and interpreter of the Constitution.

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"As the final arbiter of the law, the Court is charged with ensuring the American people the promise of equal justice under law and, thereby, also functions as guardian and interpreter of the Constitution." https://www.supremecourt.gov/about/constitutional.aspx

I never said that Roe v Wade was moral, or the correct legal decision. Perhaps one day, the Supreme Court may re-interpret that decision and reverse itself. But I would not expect Neil Gorsuch to see the law that way, which is the basic point that I am trying to make.

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I believe you misunderstand what I am saying. I do not use the words, "emotion" or "personal feelings". I use the words, conscience, morality, and justice.

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Eagleye - we are talking about the nominee that Trump is recommending, not Obama. There are some Democrats that follow the Constitution, just like there are some Republicans that do not (McCain perhaps). Tulsi Gabbard is one Democrat that is principled, and will follow the constitution from what I know about her.

As to whom is a better nominee. I don't know. I heard it reported somewhere that Gorsuch was not on the first list that Trump put forward. In any event, there were 9 or so other judges that were on Trump's list.

Many of you on OPP believe that Gorsuch will be a good supreme court justice because he will strictly adhere to the letter of the law. But no one has satisfactorily addressed the concerns raised by Dr. Steve Piezcznick and the issue of human torture. What do you do if you have an immoral law? After 9-11, you have the Patriot Act and the NDAA, which have eroded our personal freedoms granted under the constitution. Just because congress passes a law, does that make it moral and does it obligate a judge to follow an unjust law?

Isn't that the same reasoning that the German judges used during WW2 to allow German Jews, gypsies, and dissidents to be sent to the gas chambers?

If you want to blankly follow a law, moral or immoral, why not simply program a computer to render a legal decision? What's the point of having a human judge render a decision if you leave out conscience and morality?

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Lady Justice is portrayed blindfolded on many—though not all—statues because tradition dictates it. According to the Supreme Court publication on Figures of Justice, justice was not blindfolded since the time of the Romans. For the Romans, Justitia was one of the four virtues, the others being Prudence, Fortitude, and Temperance. These were personal virtues, not virtues of the state. In a personal context, a blindfold would be meaningless, since a person cannot make a fair judgement without seeing clearly into the situation.

Sometime in the 16th Century, so reads the Figures of Justice document, artists began portraying Justice with a blindfold as a conscious criticism of the justice being dispensed at that time, as if to say, justice can’t see what’s really happening.

More recently, the blindfold has come to imply that justice does not favor a party based on some characteristic like race, wealth, class, or gender. This is only an ideal, however, while the sword of punishment that Justice carries is very real. The other object carried by Justice is the scales, which a blindfolded Justice can evidently not make use of.

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-statue-of-Lady-Justice-blindfolded

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You mean like our Japanese citizens during WW11 that were rounded up in internment camps for doing what exactly?