Supreme Court Already Overturning Prop 8 Judge’s “Eleventh Hour” Decisions
Thomas Messner /
On Monday, The New York Times carried an op-ed by Heritage Foundation scholar and former US Attorney General Ed Meese titled “Stacking the Deck Against Proposition 8.” In that piece, Mr. Meese criticized a series of pre-trial rulings issued by Judge Vaughn R. Walker in the landmark same-sex marriage case currently underway in federal court in San Francisco. One of those rulings involved Judge Walker’s controversial decision to broadcast the trial to other courthouses and post video recordings of the Prop 8 trial on the Internet.
On Wednesday, the US Supreme Court issued an order affirming the view of many observers that Judge Walker had indeed attempted to stack the deck in this case. In its order, the Supreme Court issued a stay prohibiting Judge Walker from broadcasting the Prop 8 trial until the parties had time to file a more traditional appeal of his order.
The lawyers defending Prop 8 had argued that Judge Walker’s broadcast order violated federal law and was a bad idea. Those arguments have been discussed in a series of excellent and substantive posts by Ed Whelan to National Review’s Bench Memos blog. Even The Washington Post published an op-ed of sorts accusing Judge Walker of performing “legal pirouettes worthy of ‘Dancing with the Stars’ to ensure cameras in his courtroom for the same-sex marriage trial.” The author of that piece stated, “I think judges should be impeccably fair, adhere without agenda to the rule of law and be as transparent as possible, so that even those who disagree with their decisions may nevertheless respect those decisions. Judge Vaughn Walker, who is presiding over the gay marriage case, has failed on these counts.” (more…)