It seems many of the nations serious thinkers are meeting in Aspen this week at the Aspen Institute. Since McCain and Gergen are also present I guess it's safe to say that some of our not so seriuos thinkers were also there. Some of the serious thinkers included Justices O'Conner and Breyer and also Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Senator Bob Bennett, and Mike McConnell, to name a few. The 2 Justices had a few interesting things to say about todays court and the Hamdan decision. Let me start this with my favorite comment from Justice O'Connor. :
"I know we have a qualified judge and this is to take nothing away from his qualifications, but I wish he (Alito) was in a skirt," she joked. "At the end of the day a wise old woman and a wise old man will reach the same conclusion. I would like to see not just two women on the court but a good many more in years to come."
http://www.aspendailynews.com/... More below
First let me say I would have loved to go to a conference like this, and see what some of these people say when surrounded by thier peers.What information has made the Press is kind of slim so far, but we can gain a few insights. What we hear from Breyer is rather dry and not so important until you tie it to his decision in the Hamdan case. From Justice Breyer :
"Of course it is an important case but what it means precisely for the future is not known," he said. "This is a job in which you have a case and you decide it as best you can. Like so many things, what history or some other people will later say about that decision is unknown and it's up to them."
I'm sure we have all started hearing what some of those people are
ranting saying about this decision already. Many of us have applauded it, made the point it slapped Bush down, etc, etc. In this point what Breyer said is one of those understated truths that are self evident. Justice O'Connor had much more to say about things beyond her slight of Alito. From Ms. O'Connor :
"I've lived a long time now and in my lifetime I've never seen such virulent criticism of judges as I've seen in the last few years. We've seen proposals both in Congress and in the state legislatures that are very surprising in that they propose specific action against judges whose decisions the legislator doesn't like," said O'Connor, singling out a pitch in South Dakota to remove judicial immunity for actions taken by judges, jurors and witnesses in cases that would allow disgruntled appellants to sue them.
I can't even begin to imagine the amount lawsuits that would be filed if we could sue the Judges, would we need a whole new system of Judges to judge the Judges ? What a total circlejerk the courts would turn into.
As I wandered the website of the Aspen Institute looking for a lil more insight, I ran across this quote from Colin Powell.
"Guantanamo ought to be closed immediately," Powell said. He said the value of holding prisoners there was unclear, but the price we were paying around the world for doing so was obvious. He said we should not release the prisoners and dismissed the objection there was no other alternative. "We have ways of dealing with this population" that do not require Gitmo, he said.
That seems to me a rather strong statement considering who Mr. Powell is/was in this whole Iraqi war. I wish I knew a whole lot more of what he said about this issue. Some of the items we missed by not being there sounds like quite a head-spinning amount of opinions to digest, still I'm hoping some of it will be available on tape or transcripts at least.
Aspen does not flinch from making intellectual demands on its audience. This afternoon we had six back-to-back sessions of nearly an hour apiece on "Independence of the Judiciary" (Sandra Day O'Connor and Stephen Breyer), "Space, Time and Reality" (Brian Greene), "Global Terror" (Shashi Tharoor and Richard Dearlove), "Religion in America" (T.D. Jakes), "Oil and Gas: the Next 50 Years" (Alan Greenspan), and "Television, Cinema and American Values" (Nora Ephron, Norman Lear, and Sydney Pollack).
I'll leave you with the links I followed and hope you choose to do some reading.
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/ http://blogs.theatlantic.com/...