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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDid You Know That Antonin Scalia's Son Is Sabotaging Wall Street Reform?
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/07/eugene-scalia-court-antonin-financial-reform-dodd-frankAmbrose Bierce once quipped that a lawyer is one skilled in the circumvention of the law. By that definition, Eugene Scalia is a lawyer of extraordinary skill. In less than five years, the 50-year-old son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has become a one-man scourge to the reformers who won a hard-fought battle to pass the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act to rein in the out-of-control financial sector. So far, he's prevailed in three of the six suits he's filed against the law, single-handedly slowing its rollout to a snail's pace. As of May, a little more than half of the nearly four-year-old law's rules had been finalized and another 25 percent hadn't even been drafted. Much of that breathing room for Wall Street is thanks to Scalia, who has deployed a hyperliteral, almost absurdist series of procedural challenges to unnerve the bureaucrats charged with giving the legislation teeth.
(snip)
Scalia's legal challenges hinge on a simple, two-decade-old rule: Federal agencies monitoring financial markets must conduct a cost-benefit analysis whenever they write a new regulation. The idea is to weigh "efficiency, competition, and capital formation" so that businesses and investors can anticipate how their bottom line might be affected. Sounds reasonable. But by recognizing that the assumptions behind these hypothetical projections can be endlessly picked apart, Scalia has found a remarkably effective way to delay key parts of the law from going into effect.
Former Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) says Scalia and the big banks are attempting an end run around the law he coauthored: "These are ideologues who want to kill the rules. They can't say they're unconstitutional. They are doing this because it's the only possible way to knock them out." (Scalia declined to comment for this article.
(snip)
In 2001, President George W. Bush tapped Scalia to work as the Department of Labor's solicitor. "It was the classic fox in the henhouse situation," says Lynn Rhinehart, general counsel at the AFL-CIO. When Senate Democrats blocked his confirmation, his father perceived a deeper slight. "Gene, I'm sure, didn't get his appointment as solicitor of labor in part because of his name," Antonin Scalia told his biographer, Joan Biskupic. In the end, Bush bypassed the Senate via a recess appointment and Scalia spent a year at Labor before returning to private practice.
(end snip)
Soooo, Scalia's son was a Bush recess appointment to Labor? Interesting. Ironic. I wonder if he was appointed during a break of 10 or more days.
emphasis mine
catbyte
(34,337 posts)special interests. We don't stand a chance unless we can find a way to curb this.
yeoman6987
(14,449 posts)is to keep the Democratic Senate and to ensure a Democratic President in 2016. Anything short, forget it.
catbyte
(34,337 posts)I know that will never happen tho.
LuvNewcastle
(16,835 posts)I'm not even sure they would do it if we had a Democratic Congress. Scalia would be hard to get, considering the lack of rules governing the Supreme Court right now, but Thomas should be easy to get. He lied on his fucking tax returns, for Chrissake! And it wasn't just a little bit, it was hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he did it for years!
If we ever get a Democratic House and Senate, we should demand that they go after Thomas. He'd probably resign rather than go through an impeachment trial.
littlemissmartypants
(22,590 posts)"Natural causes" and then there is always root medicine with voodoo as a back up plan.
mountain grammy
(26,598 posts)valerief
(53,235 posts)sgtbenobo
(327 posts)....and deeper.
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/08/21/Scalia-Alito-sons-at-same-law-firm/UPI-95101377113754/
Carry on.
2banon
(7,321 posts)I guess it pays to be an anti-birth control, anti-choice Catholic in the U.S. IN-Justice system.
brooding spawns in their likeness -- really pays.
There are times I'm convinced that the biggest mistake we leftists made this past 50 years, was choosing to have too few or no children. May have been environmentally and economically SOUND reasoning, but it's been a political disaster. Now their population explosion is breeding more of the same.. guessing at the math. it's not looking good.
kelliekat44
(7,759 posts)bashing Obama and reporting on Kanye and Kim.
theHandpuppet
(19,964 posts)Between the nasty, mean old man, his anti-choice whackjob wife and his snake of a son, it's a real dynasty they've got going there.
LuvNewcastle
(16,835 posts)The Scalias make the Gottis look like pillars of the community.
WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)LuvNewcastle
(16,835 posts)Ed Suspicious
(8,879 posts)Or did I misread that?
LuvNewcastle
(16,835 posts)"Fat Tony" is just his nickname around here. His ugliness has nothing to do with his weight, really. He's not even that fat. I think people call him "Fat Tony" because it sounds like a mob name, and he's a key figure in the RW mob. They're worse than the mafia.
Ed Suspicious
(8,879 posts)It seems like if 'Fat Tony' were 'Skinny Pete' the idea that he would have a hard time looking good wouldn't even have been raised. I guess that's what set me off to your comment. Sorry for the side-bar.
WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)littlemissmartypants
(22,590 posts)NJCher
(35,620 posts)Last edited Tue Jul 8, 2014, 10:56 AM - Edit history (1)
Reminds me of my protest sign.
This was sometime after bush's first election theft and after the SC delivered another one of their "narrow" rulings that only favor 1 per cent interests.
I bought a huge and I mean HUGE piece of foam core and printed out Tony "the Fixer" Scalia and put it on both sides of my sign. I jumped on the train to Princeton carrying this huge sign (which got a good amount of attention) and made my way to the Princeton campus where he was speaking.
I was so pleased when he came to the window and I was standing right under a street light. He looked at me, I looked at him.
There was a good-sized crowd of us and a few people who were in the meeting where he was speaking came down to tell us we were drowning out his speech with our chants. That made me happy.
Cher
JimDandy
(7,318 posts)Great story...good work!
ReRe
(10,597 posts)Antonin has a total of nine children! God, I wonder what the rest of them are doing behind the scenes?
WinkyDink
(51,311 posts)davidpdx
(22,000 posts)littlemissmartypants
(22,590 posts)littlemissmartypants
myrna minx
(22,772 posts)Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)Worst supreme court ever!
Dustlawyer
(10,494 posts)Chip off of the ol' block-head, Daddy must be proud!
Both Scalia and Alito's son's work at the same mammoth firm that represents BP in their numerous delaying appeals on the shitty Class Action Settlement that is denying 75% of victims while BP plays the victim because of several hundred claims that fit the V shaped accounting curve that BP came up with in the Agreement to avoid having to look for causation in each and every case. I'll hand it too them, it was a master's stroke for a amoral corporation. They secretly LOVE this deal because it saves them billions in payouts to "legitimate claims" (remember BP said the would pay "all legitimate claims"from day 1) while at the same time, the few claims that had losses not caused by the spill that meet the V shaped accounting curve that BP has to pay are what they are using to play the victim and hold up ALL SETTLEMENTS for a 10 month period until last month.
The victims had to show a drop in income in 2010 after the spill, but they had to rebound in 2011 to get any money. Most businesses did not rebound that quick. Hell, most Americans believed there was actually 20 billion set aside in a fund when Obama blessed the newly formed Gulf Coast Claims a Facility with the "Independent" Ken Feinberg (BP hand picked him to be "independent" and came to Obama's rescue, so he thought, to get the disaster out of the MSM since they were calling it "Obama's Katrina!" He even gave BP control over the Coast Guard to do BP's bidding. It was the Coast Guard and their big planes that sprayed the Corexit which is killing the Gulf sea life, but which sunk the oil to the bottom where it couldn't be seen or recovered.
I digressed to BP to demonstrate that we in the BP case do not stand a chance of ever winning at the SCOTUS level since Scalia and Alito never recuse themselves!
Overseas
(12,121 posts)mountain grammy
(26,598 posts)and his war against working people who aren't even earning enough to support themselves. Eugene Scalia is the son of Satan himself.
Rex
(65,616 posts)They are two fuckwads cut from the same pile of scum.
Warpy
(111,162 posts)and that the son is just as crooked as the old man is.
That he'd spend his life attacking American citizens in order to keep us weak and powerless comes as no surprise to me.
benld74
(9,901 posts)they perform Benefit-Cost analysis, with the Benefits weighing MORE than the costs. 30 year experience talking here
geretogo
(1,281 posts)wall safe .
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Thank you for a great OP and thread, deminks!
MoreGOPoop
(417 posts)Take Back the House 2014!
Unplug the Fox Box!
tclambert
(11,084 posts)Scarsdale
(9,426 posts)Fat Tony and Uncle Thomas should resign. Both are just gop tools. Scalia flew on Air Force Two with Dickless Cheney on hunting trips. Thomas has a shrew of a wife who in her sober moments (few and far between, I gather) is a rabid organizer of Tea Party affairs.
The Wizard
(12,536 posts)who worked for the law firm representing Bush in Bush v Gore?
blkmusclmachine
(16,149 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)A liitle deregulation here, a little tax break there, and it pretty quick adds up to a tidy sum.
hughee99
(16,113 posts)He was appointed in 2001. This was well before the Pro-forma sessions began.