USSC Chief Justice Roberts captures right-wing sense of ENTITLEMENT: $165,000 "NOT ENOUGH for GOOD QUALITY JUDGES"!

Oh, you have to love that Right-Wing sense of ENTITLEMENT! The peons are MEANT to work the farms and factories and menial labor for pennies per hour, not nearly enough to fund health care and pensions much less holidays and children's higher education... but to get TOP QUALITY JUDGES, $175,000 per year just ain't enough to keep that top talent!

Actually, we here at this blog may agree with the notion that living in Washington, DC, and other major cities is far more expensive than living in more rural parts of the country; presidential counselor VINCE FOSTER went from making over $300,000 per year as a big fish in a small pond in Little Rock, Arkansas, to making less than half of that in DC, supporting two different households. (His wife, understanding the back-stabbing nature of Washington politics, refused to join him in DC after the Clintons won the election of 1992.) As a successful high-powered lawyer and self-made business man, Foster must have had some degree of "control freak" to his nature (as with all successful people in high-stress jobs), and he clearly wasn't prepared for the ferocious dog-eat-dog fishbowl of establishment Washington (please forgive the mixed metaphors), and he clearly went into depression at being unable to stop the relentless, often infantile (if sometimes self-inflicted) hounding of his friends in the White House, Bill and Hillary Clinton.

But today we KNOW where Chief Justice Robert's sympathies lie.... WITH the Right-Wing attack dog politics that made "White House TRAVEL OFFICE FIRINGS" into a (gasp!) "SCANDAL," and set the course for the many other bogus scandals that bedeviled the Clinton White House for eight full years to its final days in office. (To list some important ones briefly, "White House Travel office scandal," "Filegate scandal," Vince Foster suicide/MURDER! "scandal," Buddhist Temple 'SCANDAL," China missiles "SCANDAL," nuclear secrets "SCANDAL," Whitewater real-estate flop "SCANDAL," "Lincoln bedroom SCANDAL,' "Pardon-gate SCANDAL," and the final act against the Clinton administration, the ENTIRELY BOGUS "White House TRASHING scandal" of January 2001, concocted by the incoming Bush/Rove/Cheney/Karen Hughes/Ari Fleisher/et al administration. )

It was FAKE SCANDALS such as the above that put Texas Gov. George W. Bush within STEALING RANGE of the 2000 election, and it was the last of the above fake "SCANDALS" (the "White House TRASHING scandal" of 2001) that gave the new president COVER to REPUDIATE his "more bipartisan tone in Washington" 2000 campaign pledge (by engaging almost exclusively in Repub. PHOTO-OP and FUNDRAISER partisan attack politics all through 2001) - at the expense of his SWORN DUTIES to "PRESERVE AND PROTECT" these United States. Mr. Bush in August of 2001 put his VACATION and REPUBLICAN FUNDRAISER parties __AHEAD__ of the national security of the United States, Mr. Bush DISREGARDED warnings that Al Qaida was hoping to attack in America to top their (al Qaida's) SUCCESSFUL coordinated attacks on US embassies in 1998 and the USS Cole in October of 2000, in favor of those fundraiser dinners and time out on his ranch outside of Waco, Texas.

Oh - and it was Mr. Bush's Republican anti-Democratic SCANDAL MONGERING that ULTIMATELY PUT JOHN ROBERTS up for nomination as... a US Supreme Court Chief Justice.

So today, Mr. Roberts is crying a tear for those "WELL QUALIFIED" lawyers who MIGHT make good candidates for the federal bench... but just couldn't see fit to go DOWN in salary to only $165,000 per year (WITH federal health care for lifetime tenure for family included, among many other juicy federal benefits.)

As we said at the top of this post, there's that RIGHT-WING MILLIONAIRE SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT coming screaming through.

And as to Mr. Robert's talking point that "the strength and INDEPENDENCE judges need to UPHOLD THE RULE OF LAW... may be ERODED", well, maybe Mr. Roberts would like to speak to how the 15th Amendment _to the US CONSTITUTION_ ("the right to vote SHALL NOT BE ABRIDGED....") WAS not only IGNORED for _100 years_ from the end of reconstruction to the Voting Rights and Civil Rights bills of 1964 and 1965 (respectively), but as recently as 2000 and 2004, the states of FLORIDA and OHIO (among many others) saw fit to _ABRIDGE_ the voting RIGHTS of thousands of their voting citizens, (whose votes were DISENRANCHISED and ILLEGALLY DISCARDED) as well.

In TYPICAL Righty fashion, Mr. Roberts can't waste his breath (or USSC pen) defending VOTING RIGHTS and the US CONSTITUTION as it applies to voting law, but he will shed a tear for quarter-million dollar per year pay-scales and "upholding the rule of law" - laws that HE sees fit to uphold, that is.

(Note the CNN inflammatory headline, "Low pay THREATENS judiciary, Roberts WARNS." We wonder if we ever saw the CNN headline "FRAUDULENT vote-counting THREATENS American democracy." Nah, probably not.)
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Low pay threatens judiciary, Roberts warns
POSTED: 11:09 a.m. EST, January 2, 2007
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/01/01/judges.pay.ap/index.html

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pay for federal judges is so inadequate that it threatens to undermine the judiciary's independence, Chief Justice John Roberts says in a year-end report critical of Congress.

Roberts said the judiciary will not properly serve its constitutional role if it is restricted to people so wealthy that they can afford to be indifferent to the level of judicial compensation, or to people for whom the judicial salary represents a pay increase.

Issuing an eight-page message devoted exclusively to salaries, Roberts says the 678 full-time U.S. District Court judges, the backbone of the federal judiciary, are paid about half that of deans and senior law professors at top schools.

In the 1950s, 65 percent of U.S. District Court judges came from the practicing bar and 35 percent came from the public sector. Today the situation is reversed, Roberts said, with 60 percent from the public sector and less than 40 percent from private practice.

Federal district court judges are paid $165,200 annually; appeals court judges make $175,100; associate justices of the Supreme Court earn $203,000; the chief justice gets $212,100.

Thirty-eight judges have left the federal bench in the past six years and 17 in the past two years.

The issue of pay, says Roberts, "has now reached the level of a constitutional crisis."

"Inadequate compensation directly threatens the viability of life tenure, and if tenure in office is made uncertain, the strength and independence judges need to uphold the rule of law -- even when it is unpopular to do so -- will be seriously eroded," Roberts wrote.

Legislation languished in Congress in 2006 that would have provided a 16 percent increase in federal judges' salaries. The bill was introduced by Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein of California, Patrick Leahy of Vermont and John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Leahy, incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said Roberts "is right that the issue of judicial compensation relations to the issue of the independence of the judiciary." Leahy said the chief justice "has tackled a touchy but timely topic that has been a chronic sticking point between the judicial and legislative branches."

Over the past 16 years, Congress has provided the judiciary occasional cost-of-living adjustments, but Roberts said the absence of salary increases is "grievously unfair."

Leahy pledged "to do what I can to convince Congress to fairly evaluate this issue and the chief's arguments so that we can see what solutions may be possible."

It is the first time in the two-decade history of year-end reports by Roberts and his predecessor, the late William Rehnquist, that the chief justice's message has focused entirely on a single subject.

There are "very good judges" in both of those categories, said Roberts, but a judiciary drawn more and more from only those categories "would not be the sort of judiciary on which we have historically depended to protect the rule of law in this country."

"It changes the nature of the federal judiciary when judges are no longer drawn primarily from among the best lawyers in the practicing bar," Roberts wrote.

The number of cases filed in the Supreme Court increased for the court's 2005 term, according to an appendix to the report. Supreme Court case filings rose by more than 1,000 to 8,521 from the previous term. Appeals court filings dropped by 3 percent to 66,618 in 2006 compared with 2005.

In federal district courts, the number of criminal cases filed in 2006 declined by 4 percent to 66,860 cases and 88,216 defendants, due to changing priorities directing more resources to combating terrorism.

The civil caseload rose 2 percent to 259,541.

Excluding a jump in asbestos-related cases which totaled 18,179, the civil caseload fell by 4 percent.