Good Bye Sandra... And Good Riddance!
By Edward Daley (07/02/05)
Ronald Reagan, like all presidents, made a few mistakes while he was in office, and one of his more regrettable blunders was nominating a judge by the name of Sandra Day O'Connor for a position on the highest court in the land.
Although many people in the left-wing media like to refer to her as a "moderate" jurist, that characterization only proves that they have no idea what a judge's job actually is. Using the word moderate to describe a judge, is like using the word Jewish to describe a cat. The term simply does not apply. It is a political distinction, and part of a judge's job is to be apolitical.
Of course, some judges, like Ms. O'Connor and a few of her chums on the Supreme Court (USSC) have never been able to leave their political biases out of the equation when making legal decisions. But instead of journalists calling them what they really are, which is just plain incompetent, they get labeled things like moderate.
I don't know about you, but I've yet to figure out how a judge goes about making a moderate ruling. I was always under the impression that there were only two kinds of rulings, proper and improper, but apparently a third type exists somewhere in between the two.
Something else I keep hearing people in the media say is that Ms. O'Connor has been a key "swing vote" on the court. This assertion annoys the hell out of me, because the people making it are implying that the court is made up of four liberals, four conservatives, and the independent Justice Sandra, who sits around weighing the arguments of each ideological side and then, in her infinite wisdom, rules with the side she believes makes the most sense at any given time.
As I pointed out before, using such a term to describe a USSC justice is totally inappropriate. The words swing vote are political in nature, and therefore inapplicable. These people aren't a legislative committee, they're a panel of judges! Their rulings are supposed to be based upon the literal meaning of the written laws of the land, and when they consider cases in which questions of Constitutionality are raised, they are duty bound to interpret the meaning of the words within that document without regard to their own political views.
The fact of the matter is that there are only two types of Supreme Court Justices, originalists, who try to understand what the Constitution's authors intended their words to mean when they wrote them, and activists, who seek to manipulate the intended meaning of those words to fit their personal ideologies.
Sandra Day O'Connor is, and has always been a member of the latter group, and it is for that reason alone that she should never have been appointed to the high court, or been allowed to sit on any court which deals with Constitutional issues.
Thankfully, she has just decided to retire, and in my opinion, not a moment too soon. Unfortunately, even if she is replaced by a competent originalist judge, there will still be five activists (aka fascists in black robes) gumming up the works for years to come, and their names are Stephen Breyer, John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
By Edward L. Daley
Owner of the Daley Times-Post
http://www.times-post.com
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