All Blog Posts from Political Hotsheet

A consortium of liberal groups called the Coalition for Constitutional Values has released a campaign-style ad in support of President Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor.

The 30-second spot features audio of the president discussing what he seeks in a nominee as Sotomayor's accomplishments and biography appear onscreen, along with photos of the judge.

The accomplishments listed as the president speaks of seeking "someone with a sharp and independent mind" include the fact that Sotomayor was first appointed by George H.W. Bush, a Republican president.

As Mr. Obama is heard saying he wants someone who understands that justice is about "how our laws affect the daily realities of peoples' lives," it is noted that Sotomayor's father died when she was nine years old.

The spot goes on to call Sotomayor principled and fair-minded and say she is "keeping faith with our Constitutional values." It will run on national network news and cable news beginning today, according to the coalition, at a six-figure cost. Watch it below.

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President Obama plans to give a major speech on national security and the Guantanamo Bay detainees tomorrow in Washington, D.C., and it seems that considerable thought has been given to the venue.

The speech will be given in a large room used to display the Constitution at the National Archives, CBS News' Mark Katkiv reports. The symbolism on a day when the president is discussing prisoner's rights and national security issues is obvious.

The documents on display in the room tomorrow will be reproductions, Katkov reports, because the originals cannot safely be exposed to light.

Believe it or not, this is precisely the way the Founding Fathers envisioned how the Constitution could work. Pressure from the judicial branch (a pending deadline to file a substantive brief) and the legislative branch (Congressional subpoenas to Bush officials) forced the White House into compromising over the scope of executive privilege in the U.S. Attorney matter. It’s a win-win-win, Steve Carell would say.

Or, you can look at it another way. The deal that finally delivers Karl Rove and Harriet Miers into Rep. John Conyers Congressional den of inquiry came about because neither the Obama Administration, nor the Congress, wanted to risk creating “bad” legal precedent about the scope of the privilege—federal law that might be political convenient now, but which could hinder future administrations (or even this one, a few years down the road).

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It’s a story that reads like the start of a joke about lawyers. “What do you get when you have 33 legal academics and jurists with nothing better to do...?”

Not content with writing boring law review articles, or fighting among themselves about whose navel is best contemplated, a group of leading lights in legal scholarship have gathered together to try to argue in the court of public opinion that the Supreme Court needs a structural overhaul.

Not surprisingly, since all these people are lawyers remember, there is no agreement even within the group about whether and how that can happen.

Here’s how the Washington Post’s Robert Barnes puts it: "For starters, the group proposes a form of term limits, moving justices to senior status after 18 years on the court. The proposal says that justices now linger so long that it diminishes the likelihood that the court's decisions 'will reflect the moral and political values of the contemporary citizens they govern.'

"To get around the Constitution's prescription that justices serve for life, the group would let justices stay on the court in a senior role -- filling in on a case, perhaps, or dispatched to lower courts -- or lure them into retirement with promises of hefty bonuses. It would set up a regular rotation on the court by providing for the nomination of a new justice by the president with each new two-year term of Congress. If that results in more than the current nine justices, only the nine most junior would hear cases.”

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