Judge Roberts: Smooth Operator?

America, Bush, Justice, Law, Republicans, The Courts

It’s hard not to warm to Judge John G. Roberts Jr. His poised and humble demeanor accentuates the lack thereof in Charles Schumer and Joe Biden. He doesn’t display the two Democrats’ detestable uppityness. He’s also easy on the eye. (So he pancaked his face a bit. That’s nothing compared to Botox Babe, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi.) I like that he never gets defensive.

Ditto for what he had to say about the case of Kelo v. the City of New London. As if the public-use clause was not bad enough, The Court, as I understood it (perhaps I didn’t), affirmed the transfer of private property from one invariably reluctant owner to another eager and well-connected one. All for the Common Good. In no way can this decision be framed as deference to Connecticut’s sovereignty. This might have been the case had The Court declined to consider the case. Kelo, to all intents and purposes, has nationalized such unjust takings. In any event, Roberts retorted by reminding Congress of its duty to step in and uphold rights. Not bad.

I liked the way he responded to Republican Arlen Specter’s petulant demand that Congress be coddled. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee asked that Roberts not consider his method of reasoning superior to that of Congress. (From where did that come? Specter’s Inner Child? Maybe it’s an inside joke.) Roberts reverted masterfully to the Constitution, and spoke about “institutional competence,” as opposed intellectual competence (neither of which the Congressional clowns possess).

The overweening Biden was knocked out nicely. He ventured that Roberts owed the electorate more than he was giving up. Roberts reminded blowhard Joe that he was not standing for an election. Rather, if confirmed, he’d be going on the bench to adhere to a judicial process—an impartial one, not predicated on promises made to special interests.
When asked about free speech, he quoted jurist Louis Brandeis’ “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Again, good move.
But, here’s the thing that unsettles: Roberts seems to be all about the moves. Is that good?
Some Senator, whose name I can’t recall, posed The Mother of All Questions (in my decidedly unmainstream opinion). This good fellow asked Roberts whether the Administrative State under which we strain comports with the Constitution and the Founders’ vision. The Managerial State—its endless rules and regulations—whence does it derive its legitimacy? It wasn’t that Roberts was flummoxed by this First-Principles quandary; it just seemed alien to him. It swooshed right by. He answered what was a philosophical question with a legalistic ramble about administrative law. I find it hard to believe such a gifted man would misconstrue so simple a question. So I worry.
William Rehnquist did not believe the procedures governing bureaucracy-stiffened administrative agencies encapsulated the Constitution’s original scheme. In a superb (and stylish) piece in The Wall Street Journal, Randy Barnett elaborated on the late Chief Justice’s “New Federalism.” Case by case Rehnquist had begun to resurrect the eternal verities of limited and delegated federal power and States’ Rights. Lo and behold: in attempting, piecemeal, to revive the notion of a constitutionally limited government, Rehnquist even deferred increasingly to the 10th Amendment, which has been mocked out of meaning. He also did a great deal to reverse “interstate commerce” judicial abominations.

As affable as he is, Roberts, regrettably, is no Janice Rogers Brown. Their devotion (and dotage) prevents President Bush’s lickspittles from realizing that he too considers Rogers Brown “outside the mainstream,” to use the Democrats’ demotic line. Let’s hope, at the very least, that Roberts is a Rehnquist.

Classical Liberalism And State Schemes

Classical Liberalism, libertarianism, The State

About Classical Liberalism and State Schemes, Norman Singleton (aid to Congressman Ron Paul) writes this: “Ilana Mercer presents one of the best refutations of liberventionism I have read. Mercer demonstrates how support for global crusades for ‘human rights’ are fundamentally incompatible with a belief in small government, individual rights and a skepticism about state power. Particularly good is Mercer’s argument that war is a giant redistribution program.”(Thanks Mr. Singleton—and to Tom DiLorenzo for sending this LewRockwell.com Blog link.)

Twin Deceits: Shakespeare And Holocaust Denial

Anti-Semitism, Conspiracy, English, Literature, Pseudo-history

Shakespeare too has been the victim of the assault on history and truth. Assorted conspiracy kooks identify “the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a courtier poet with some twenty fairly conventional lyrics to his name,” as the real deal. Writes Brian Vickers, in the August 19 & 26 issue of the Times Literary Supplement: “There are several insuperable objections to Oxford’s candidature: he died with a dozen of Shakespeare’s sole and co-authored plays unwritten (or at least unperformed); the style of his poetic oeuvre is extremely limited and un-Shakespearean; he led a busy and wasteful aristocratic existence abroad and at home.”

The Oxfordians, says Vickers, have performed all manner of chicanery to get around these difficulties, including to re-date plays and to “invent a new chronology, improbably dating Shakespeare’s early comedies to the late 1570s, and postulating that Oxford left drafts of all the remaining plays for Shakespeare to touch up and pass off as his own, either completely hoaxing everyone connected with the Globe [one of the theatres the busy Shakespeare managed—he worked daily with a host of theatre people], or relying on their connivance.”

“The Oxfordian cause has been vigorously pursued, with perverse enthusiasm…Supporters may sustain themselves with a sense of cocking a snook at official culture, or exposing an evil conspiracy whose existence was unsuspected for 300 years. But whatever the Oxfordians are producing, it is not scholarship.”

Scott McCrea’s The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question is “the latest in an honorable line of books reaffirming Shakespeare’s authorship, of which the most notable are H. N. Gibson’s The Shakespeare Claimants (1962), Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (1970; revised edition, 1991), Irving Matus’s Shakespeare in Fact (1994) and Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare (1997).” McCrea’s book is said to be of a high scholarly standard.

“In his final chapter, ‘All conspiracy theories are alike,’ [McCrea] suggests that ‘denial of Shakespeare follows exactly the same flawed reasoning as Holocaust denial’ in that it rejects the most obvious explanation of an event, and reinterprets evidence to fit a preconceived idea (‘the ovens at Auschwitz baked bread’).

[Curiously, when reporter Johann Hari went Undercover with the Holocaust Deniers,” he ran into our Shakespeare denier.]

Facts that contradict the theory are explained by conspiracy, but this ploy means that ‘conspiracy theories are really not theories at all,’ but faiths, which cannot be proved false. McCrea recognizes that, despite his subtitle, ‘there can never be an end to the Authorship Question,’ [ditto Holocaust denial], a depressing prospect.

He maintains a good-humored tone, a pleasant contrast to many works in this field, but one can be too cool. As we survey the never-ending flow of anti-Shakespeare books it is hard not to share the bitterness of Georg Brandes, moved in part to write his William Shakespeare (1898) by the ‘ignorant and arrogant attack’ of the ‘wretched group of dilettanti‘ who have ‘been bold enough… to deny William Shakespeare the right to his own life-work.'”

A Katrina Question

America, Government, The Military

I wonder whether we’d see a swifter emergency response and better rescue efforts in the wake of Katrina, “one of the most devastating storms ever to hit the United States,” if so many of the Army National Guard and Army Reservists were not in…Iraq. Just asking a question the cable-news nincompoops can’t (or won’t; but I think they honestly can’t… think, that is). Or if critical questions are eventually asked, it’ll be weeks or months hence.
The Army National Guard has brigade combat teams in Iraq from Idaho, Louisiana, Tennessee, Hawaii, Texas, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Illinois, Maryland, Puerto Rico, Missouri, Virginia, Mississippi—you name it. Recruitment is lagging by approximately 23 percent. In 2003, the National Guard spokesman said there were “presently about 30,500 National Guard troops stationed in Iraq and Kuwait—or about 18 percent of the total 166,000 US forces.” I’ve not been able to locate updated estimates.
Recently, a spokesman for the 155th, of which 3,500 are Mississippi National Guard soldiers, waxed about the joys of dedicating his life (and American tax dollars) to Iraq (now that’s what I call patriotism): “We are helping establish the essential needs for all people in Iraq. Electricity, water…” blah blah. “We live in a world without borders, and a threat to freedom anywhere is a threat to freedom everywhere.” Hey, what do Americans have to do to get their army reservists to bat, not for Baghdad, but for the homies and the homeland? Climb on their rooftops and yelp for help?