A Beginner's Guide to the Coming Supreme Court Battle
By Ted Baiamonte Comments: bje1000@aol.com (10/31/05)
Perhaps the most respected Democratic legal scholar in America is Laurence Tribe. He teaches at the Harvard Law School and is by all accounts regarded as a brilliant writer and thinker, but most importantly he is a Democrat, which is to say he believes in nothing that is coherent, except perhaps in the genius of his own detached words. Here is how he, and many Democrats, define the way a Supreme Court Justice should interpret the Constitution: "It's about time that I roll my legal universe into a ball and toss it into the ring as my candidate for what the final rules of the interpretive game must be. For now, and perhaps permanently, I would respectfully decline that invitation. Indeed, I am doubtful that any defensible set of ultimate "rules" exist."
So what does this mean when one says there are no rules regarding reading the Constitution? Doesn't it mean that one can't read or that one doesn't like what one reads? Does it means that the Constitution can then mean whatever one wants it to mean? If you are an ultra leftist as Tribe is, this is a perfect plan to bend the Constitution in a Communist direction. But if you are limited to interpreting the Constitution by what is written and what was intended, the Constitution is a very Republican document for which Democrats can have no appreciation. Tribe goes on and on to brilliantly explain the tremendous linguistic, moral, jurisprudential, psychological, and philosophical problems that must be solved to read, interpret, and apply a Constitution that was written 200 years ago, but in the end it is pure sophistry (admittedly, brilliant sophistry), with no coherent end, designed only to make room for his extreme left wing ideology which, not coincidentally, he doesn't allude to in even the tiniest little way. What else can you do if you're a Democrat forced to deal with the text of a Republican Constitution?
Scalia, on the other hand, is an equally brilliant thinker, but a Republican who, accordingly, can take the Constitution just as it is. When he is asked how he likes the Democratic living Constitution he replies "I like it dead." Here is what he says in a similar context: "If the people come to believe that the Constitution is not a text like other texts; that it means, not what it says or what it was understood to mean, but what it should mean, in light of the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society- well, then, they will look for qualifications other than impartiality, judgment, and lawyerly acumen in those whom they select to interpret it. They will look for judges who agree with them."
This calls to mind Roy Cohn's famously cynical comment, "don't tell me what the law is; tell me who the judge is." Anyway, Scalia closes with, "This [meaning, liberal Democratic thinking), of course, is the end of the Bill Of Rights, whose meaning will be committed to the very body it was meant to protect against: the majority. By trying to make the Constitution do everything that needs doing from age to age, we shall have caused it to do nothing at all."
For instance, everyone knows that the Constitution did not encourage abortion or pornography. In fact it did not even mention them. But nevertheless, Democratic justices did manage to find a right to abortion and pornography in the Constitution, and of course both industries then grew from almost nothing to today's massive proportions. Abortions shot up from near zero to around 1 million a year, and pornography is now available on most supermarket shelves. Suppose in ten years the Democratic trend was still continuing and there were 20 million partial birth abortions a year, and the NBC Nightly News closed with 15 minutes of prime time pornography because the network noticed it attracted higher ratings than hard news?
If the people of, say, Kansas didn't want to live in that perverted anti family culture what recourse would they have given that Democrats had rewritten the right to abortion and pornography into the federal Constitution? They would have very little recourse. The whole nation would be stuck under the tyranny of one arbitrary Democratic standard. Under the original Republican Constitution, the States would be, to a large extend that was limited only by the fundamental rights and holdings of the original Constitution, allowed to be individual subcultures. Citizens could participate and vote to shape those cultures, and, if they chose, they could leave those cultures for other more preferable cultures in other States. It would seem that the Framers original Republican Constitution offered more freedom to more people than the new national Democratic tyranny.
Yes, there are lucky times when nine guys in Washington are right, Civil Rights most notable, and some of the States are wrong, but this does not mean we should sacrifice the very concept of freedom and liberty given to us by our Framers by gambling it on nine guys in Washington. The purpose of the Constitution, based on what our Framers had deduced from all of human history, was to distribute power everywhere so it would not concentrate anywhere, and to secure only the most basic and essential rights, not to concentrate power in the hands of nine liberal Democrats in one branch of the Federal Gov't. Accordingly, when George Bush nominates a Republican replacement for Justice O'Connor, let us all pray she finds her way to the Supreme Court where she can begin, forthwith, to tear it down.
But, should the Democratic culture perverts really be so concerned about losing the Supreme Court? Probably not. The States would still have the right to enable many of the Democratic perversions, and undoubtedly some of them always would. But, most importantly, Democrats can take comfort knowing that the Republican belief in freedom and individual liberty is too great to allow them to take advantage of an opportunity to creatively find, for example, a prohibition against abortion and pornography on what the Democrats see as the Constitution's very blank pages.
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