Happy Canada Day

Canada has virtually legalised gay marriage. The bill needs only to be approved by the Senate where no major problems are expected. Spain has legalised it. Yay Canada and Spain.

In far more depressing news, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has announced her resignation from the US Supreme Court today. I think I wrote about this during the election last year: the one really big and really scary issue that would be directly impacted by the results of the election was that there was bound to be at least one--if not many--Supreme Court justices retiring during this presidential term. The Court is very finely balanced right now but Bush has no reason to keep it that way. It's true that the Republicans don't have a large enough majority in the Senate to be able to nominate whomever they want but that doesn't mean that they won't try. Bush has nothing to lose by nominating some far right judge to fill O'Connor's spot. He's already a lame duck as the lack of any bounce in the polls from Tuesday's speech shows. The problem, of course, is that we're at the beginning of an election cycle for Congress and this is bound to dominate the early part of that cycle. There's little doubt that the Democrats are going to get painted as obstructionist again for trying to stand up to any hard-line conservative nominee that Bush might through their way. The GOP might even try to take advantage of the goldfish memory of the American public and claim that they had promised not to use filibusters against judicial nominations back during the nuclear option fight. The Dems of course, promised only not to filibuster a small list of select compromise nominations and did not say anything about any future nominations.

Appointments are for a lifetime and while there will likely be more appointments during Bush's remaining years in office, if he manages to get one more hard-line conservative on the bench then we're screwed. Good-bye thirty years of progress. Good-bye abortion, environmental protection, minority (race, sexuality, gender, etc) rights. If they can swing the Supreme Court then the Republicans would have control of all three branches of government. One can only hope for a limited time only. But a conservative court can stick around for quite a long time (O'Connor herself sat on the bench for 24 years) whereas Congress and the President chance much more frequently in comparison.

Daily Kos has a list of things you can do right now to get ready to fight for a compromise, centrist nominee: http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/7/1/111447/3656

And, to borrow the words of Rob over on AmericaBlog, Happy 4th - your independence is on the line.'

PS I have a job interview on Tuesday! With this place: Coffee By Design! They're happy and socially responsible and support the local community, etc. What a nice change it would be from my last coffee-slinging experience at Starbucks. One would assume, anyway.