Your Reading Assignment For The Day
Reason magazine it ain't, folks, but Mossback Culture has some insights on the Miers nomination as well as links to some more debate. Says Bennett, in a post titled "The New Litmus Test":
Bush doesn’t care about abortion, and neither do the bibliocons. They understand that even if the Supreme Court was to strike down Roe, the states would legalize it anyway, and they’d lose their moral authority. It’s one thing to say that five men in black robes are imposing their personal views on you, and quite another to be faced with the certain knowledge that the people hold values that define you as outside the mainstream. So it’s best if Roe stays intact and the conservative movement has the issue to complain about.The real problem that bibliocons have with the court showed up earlier this year in the great shouting match over the corpse of Terri Schiavo. All along the bibliocons and paleocons had been telling us they were fed-up with activist judges getting involved in state and local issues where they didn’t belong, but suddenly they were all over the courts for refusing to be activist with respect to the family and the State of Florida. So it became clear that the right wants the mirror image of what the left wants, an activist bench that is willing to impose its personal values and beliefs on the rest of us.
Something to ponder. Isn't that what you want, guys?
Presented for your delectation by the Hired Hand at 8:01 PM
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Gentleman Farmer said ... (8:38 PM) :
post a commentAbortion is a poor vehicle for discussing judicial philosophy. Not since the Nazi death camps has a putatively civilized people slaughtered so many innocents with such industrial efficiency. And the Nazis had the excuse that they were annihilating "the Other." We in the West slaughter not even ourselves, but our children. It is not a political issue at all.
If, in mid-1943, you could have detonated a bomb and derailed a train carrying a load of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz, but in the process killed the engineer and a dozen innocent bystanders, where would your moral duty lie?
Who's the engineer in your analogy, anonymous?
Forgive me for derailing the train to the death camp, but I'd like to return to the post's question.
No, that's not what "we" want. (For demographic and statistical purposes, put me doewn as a knee-jerk, reflexive, Bible-thumping, fundamentalist, unthinking, Jeeesus-loving, born-again Christian of the religious right.) I think there was no federal issue in the Schiavo matter, but I forgive my brethren for losing sight of that fact. The circumstances (at least as we understood them) were so obnoxious.
However, that was one remarkable and even singular event. One can make a mistake in the heat of the moment. (Was it Mark Twain who said sometimes a man has to abandon his principles and do the right thing?) We don't really want Congress or the federal courts governing these end-of-life issues. We want politically accountable state governments to be responsible for them--and for abortion decisions.
I think Arlington is correct.
Setting aside how it is sometimes pitched, the real differences in Judicial Philosophies (leaving aside Philosophies in the middle, of which there are some) is this:
1. The "liberal" judicial philosophy, at its corps, does not trust the electorate to vote into recognition those values which it holds dear. These values are urban, do not recognize the validity of any religious based belief, and are expansive. So, rights which may be enshrined in the Bill of Rights, but which fall outside of this view, do not count, such as those in the 2d Amendment. Rights may be found which are not in the Constitution (they are lurking in the penumbra of it), such as vaguely expansive privacy rights.
2. "Conservative" judicial philosophy basically holds that what is in the Constitution is in it, and needs to be protected. Everything else is fair game for the electorate.
The irony of this is that the "liberal" view essentially distrusts the electorate. For this reason, the position stated in the quoted posts is wrong. If the electorate was allowed to vote on things like abortion, they likely would not take the same expansive view that the Court has. They wouldn't completely limit it like those of us who oppose it would do either. The debate, however, would become a true one, rather than the argument we have now. Still, it is very intersting to note that the liberal notion here is to restrict voting rights, as they fear what the electorate would do. That is not Liberal, with a large L. Rather, it's something like elitist, as it holds that people aren't smart enough to vote the way they should, if the Constitution has not taken it outside of the arena of a legitimate topic for voting (and it has some, such as free speech, etc.).
As always, sorry for the mispellings. I'm neither a typist nor a proofreader.
My first reaction to this (besides "what a bunch of crap") was: this is what hacks in the Beltway believe. It's not a reflection of reality at the grassroots level. It might make consultants like my former boss a lot of money, but it's not what the people who are writing the $25 checks are hoping to achieve.
Regular voters outside the Beltway want to be respected, want to have confidence that their Government will be there when they need it in a predictable way (the military, the police, the courts, and when there is an emergency), and otherwise want to be left alone.
Many voters feel they have been neither respected nor left alone when very important people in Washington decide that the school nurse can send their daughter off for an abortion without her parents knowing anything about it, or that their property can be taken for some developer in cahoots with the mayor, or that it's really much more important that even more of their money go to Washington, because if it doesn't, those stupid voters will just waste it anyways.
To the extent that can be fit into a "judicial philosophy," they're all for it.