Redstate

I've got a little live blog going of the rumors (or are they more?) here if anyone's interested.

Hey, I'm not big on knocking others, but why pull down the post?  Isn't a part of blogging you leave up your bad calls, as well as your good ones?  We all bat 1.000 if we can erase the bad ones...just my two cents...

Now that you have set the precedent as the gold standard in getting the first scoop as to who is retiring from the SC, we expect you to tell us the names of the next nominees first also! LOL

Powder Blue Report

Is very funny.  CNN is trying to pretend that they are watching POTUS like a hawk for no real reason; FOX is at least admitting that it's up in the air and are discussing him now.

Funny stuff, how we are all watching and watching and watching--including me....

Great job, Erick. This is quite a fun game this evening. Important yes, but you have to love the thrill of all this.

even if you are right? I mean, I'll take an easy target. Just kidding, great job Erick, we appreciate all the work you have put into this.

Or in the case of dKos, we would have empty archives.

Then you'll want to ridicule me.

More like gently poke fun, and use the g-word.

Ridiculing Erick in any seriousness always struck me as a profoundly bad idea. Don't let the man deceive you, no matter how deep South the accent and your reaction to the same.

But with one quibble.

So far all we've heard about your "sources." Sounds like you have a lot of them kicking around out there, and I think it's time you gave them names to help everybody keep track. Cool names, like "Oil Can," and "Tex." Kinda like "Deep Throat," only much more awesome.

But the all complained.  I called one the digest because he's a compendium of all sorts of interesting stuff and he called and said that was f'ing unoriginal.

I mentioned to another one that I wanted to have a nickname for her and she didn't like any of them.

Armando thinks I'm a bit dim.  I guess so.  Coming up with nicknames sucks -- except for porno nicknames which really aren't appropriate for on here.

Does Erick get all "Zell" on people? GUNS AT DAWN!!!!!! <As I cower in fear>

Wikipedia's entry notes his retirement today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehnquist

Curious.

I have to give a lot of props to Claude Shannon and John von Neumann and J.C.R. Licklider and many others of helping to invent the machines that have led to the phenomeon that we're witnessing today:

Never have so many who are living so well wasted so much time thinking about something so utterly beyond their control.  The global punditocracy:  just say no!

(And Erick, I don't blame you.)

I suggest a new term:  The irrelvosphere.

I cannot find the statement of retirement you refer to, I could be blind. Please state exactly where it is.

I'd give you a "5" if my ratings weren't turned off!!!!!

Place a crocodile with a chicken in a pit and train it not to eat the thing.

The outcome is never known either way.

did the ratings get shut off again, or was I just a bad boy?

"On July 8, 2005, the Drudge Report announced that Rehnquist was set to retire, although this has not been officially confirmed. An announcement is scheduled for the early evening hours EST of July 8, 2005, by the White House."

In Erick's defense, he got it right, just not the time exactly. The resignation was handed in. What the White House want to do with it I have no inside info on that.

In the end, Erick is still correct. The resignation "was" handed in and it will come to pass within a day or so.

Wikipedia scoops 'em all?

Does anyone by any chance have copies of any of the deleted SCOTUSblog comments?  For example, in your Internet cache, or copied during the day?  I saw the Marty Lederman postings adamently rejecting the Novak report, but didn't see the Tom Goldstein "me too" post.  If anyone has something, please send it to me at CONCOWBOY at MAILCAN dot COM.

A few weeks back I started a blog devoted to critiquing SCOTUSblog, at http://anti-scotusblog.blogspot.com.  I haven't done much on it lately, though there have been a good number of comments lately by others, but this incident has really energized me.  Three weeks back I was about to post on Marty Lederman, about an unprofessional post he'd done, and about his background (I've found very little about him, and he refused to send me a C.V. when I e-mailed him for one, so I'm wondering whether commentators can fill in the gaps), but I decided to lay off him, because he seemed somewhat peripheral to SCOTUSblog.  

Now I'm reversing course, because for Lederman to step out on a limb like this, and then when he became worreid he was wrong, to ask Goldstein to rewrite history for him, seems like dishonest behavior on the part of both of them.  So unless he and Goldstein quickly put back the posts that were deleted and stop trying to rewrite history, I'm really going to probe the background of this Lederman guy (of whom I still know very little), blog about the earlier unprofessional post by him, look at his past posts carefully, and generally give him some careful scrutiny.  That actually might be a good development for Tom Goldstein in deflecting attention away from him:  some of the comments on my blog have been quite harsh about Goldstein.

This is an awesome blog and I'm pleased to see that you have a firm policy of never deleting past posts, no matter how embarrassing they make you look.  I have the same policy, and I think it's the only honest and ethical policy for a blogger to have.  Given the problems I've seen and some of my commentators have seen with SCOTUSblog and with Tom Goldstein, I'm not surprised to hear that at SCOTUSblog they feel free to rewrite history to make themselves look better.  This, I think, significantly undermines the credibility of SCOTUSblog generally, and of Goldstein in particular (who apparently is already the subject of considerable ridicule among Supreme Court clerks and various lawyers, judging from comments on my blog and on the "Greedy Clerks" board).  

I think this will turn out to be a significant and damaging lapse of judgment by Goldstein, who in recent months has been pilloried for having terrible judgment (going back to March, with the backfiring of his attempt to defend Larry Tribe against the National Review story about Tribe having falsely tried to claim credit for the Ninth Amendment work by other lawyers in Tribe's first Supreme Court case).  Time will tell.

I'd appreciate any copies of the posts of earlier today that anyone can send me, as I'd like to reconstruct the posts as accurately as possible and put the information on Anti-SCOTUSBLOG to ensure there is a a truthful historical record of the Lederman and Goldstein posts.

I posted contains this quote:

"His record of accomplishment on the Court is coming to a close, however, because on July 8, 2005, Rehnquist announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, effective upon the confirmation of his successor"

If you cannot find this, maybe there's a system glitch or a mirror cite which doesn't have it, but it struck me as a Dewey beats Truman statement.

should read "interesting."

Preview is my friend. ;0)

And then I shall retire to my study.  At least 'till I get bored again.

All of the rumors about the liberal Justices are probably exaggerated yet true.  Ginsberg's health probably could be better, but it's not as bad as some are saying.  Stevens isn't getting any younger, but if he does retire, it probably won't be before next year.  Souter may indeed want to live out his later years like a normal person, but I don't doubt he'll hold on for a less intense year to retire.

Still, POTUS likely knows that at least one more Justice will retire before his term is up and he's saving Gonzales for that.

The Rehnquist and O'Connor seats, then, have to include at least one female replacement.  As I said yesterday, the most likely result is a male/female combo, with age, connections to TX, and conservative creds as the main factors.  Luttig and Roberts fit the male candidate's criteria best.  Clement and Jones fit the profile for the female spot.  The dark horse ticket is Cornyn/Owen, as both would be an easier sell to a Senate that hates to bash its own and has already agreed that Priscilla Owen on the federal courts does not an extraordinary circumstance make.

Final thought: if POTUS really wants to detonate the nuclear option, he'll nominate Owen.  He knows that McCain, Graham, Warner, and DeWine will feel extremely betrayed if the Democrat 7 chose to filibuster her and would join the rest of the GOP to go nuclear, ending the judicial filibuster once and for all.

Erick, assuming it's just Rehnquist and O'Connor retiring for now, what's the latest on possible replacements?  I'm hearing the President is intent on nominating Gonzales for one of these two spots, and that it's practically a done deal.  It's hearsay from a trustworthy source, and the original source is the White House.  Can you offer anything to allay (or confirm) my fears?

OK - the editors at Wiki fixed it. And Dewey still hasn't won.

Thanks to a very prompt e-mail response to my post, I now have the Lederman and Goldstein posts that Goldstein took off his blog.

I'll also cover this on my blog, http://anti-scotusblog.blogspot.com, but this seems the sequence of events:

3:07 p.m.:  Lederman posts, saying:  "The Chief Justice Will Not be Retiring Today . . . notwithstanding what Robert Novak has reported."

4:53 p.m.:  Goldstein posts:  "I've checked with everyone I can, and my information is that Marty is right (and that the Drudge Report channeling Bob Novak is wrong) that the Chief is not retiring today."

A few minutes after that, Goldstein loses his nerve and removes this content from the front page of his blog, probably after learning of Erick's post of 4:30 p.m., and of similar reports confirming it in the half hour after that, saying "it is done" -- that Rehnquist has retired.  (This report quite likely is accurate, with the letter simply not having been publicly disclosed yet.)  

We know Goldstein took down the posts right after his 4:53 p.m. post because of a comment on Volokh at 5:13 p.m. that the posts were missing, so the failure of nerve seems obvious.  Goldstein hasn't given any reason other than failure of nerve for taking them down.

Ineptly, in trying to get rid of the posts Goldstein only deleted them from the front page of his blog, and the posts weren't deleted from the URLs in his archive, so people were still able to read the posts through permalinks on other blogs.  I suppose he'll now rely on that ineptitude to claim he wasn't trying to delete the historical record after all, in another slippery dodge of the sort Goldstein's becoming known for.

But Goldstein wasn't done for the day.  Having tried to rewrite history to distance him and Lederman from a prediction Rehnquist wouldn't retire, an hour later he started rewriting history again to take some credit for the prediction.  Once the resignation letter hadn't been released by 6 p.m., so it was looking more like Lederman/Goldstein might be right, Goldstein decided he wanted to take credit for calling it "no resignation" after all, so at 6:09 p.m. he made this post:  "We removed Marty's post and then my follow-up saying that Rehnquist wouldn't retire today."  http://www.scotusblog.com/movabletype/archives/2005/07/rehnquist_posts_1.ht
ml.  That way, people would know they'd predicted this earlier in the day.

Goldstein then added, obviously responding to criticisms on this blog and on Volokh (without admitting he'd read the criticsms), that he wanted "to make sure that no one thought that we were trying to 'rewrite history'" -- which, of course, is exactly what people had concluded, as he well knew.  But Goldstein merely asserted he hadn't been trying to do that; he didn't explain why he'd deleted the posts from the front page of his blog.  Obviously, the explanation is he momentarily lost his nerve, and in a spell of bad judgment he thought he could make the whole thing go away by just deleting the posts, without considering the reaction to his deleting them -- and now he had to say something about it to try to make it less of a big deal.  Goldstein doesn't provide any information to support any other conclusion.

At least that's my take on it.  Goldstein's mind is too mysterious for any mere mortal to fathom, and I don't expect he'll do anything to clear up this mystery, as he'll likely decide to cut his losses and move on to his next disaster.  I'll do my best to continue covering the SCOTUSblog hijinks on my blog, but these days they're keeping me rather busy.  I must say this latest stunt sure has energized the project.

I expect my next post on my blog, recapping Goldstein's ineffectual and mysterious effort to rewrite history, may be titled "The Return of 'Slippery Tom'" (if the name fits, use it), and that I'll then be exploring who the heck this Lederman guy is, and problems I see with a post he made awhile back.  Drop by if you're interested.

Mr. Erickson, that fact that the rumors didn't pan out doesn't make us any less beholden to you for your great work keeping everyone informed...have a great, restful weekend!

but still didn't weren't true.

k

I just don't understand the need for rampant

speculation and rumor mongering in relation to

any of the SCOTUS members.  

Will it affect your life in any way if one of

them resigns tonight? tomorrow? next month?  It

only becomes important once they do make

it official.  

All of this also serves to desensitize people to

the whole issue of SCOTUS.