The Bushies New Judicial Pick

Bush, Constitution, Justice, Law, Republicans, The Courts

Bush’s new Supreme Court nomination may turn out to be the cathartic event to push his loyalists over the edge. Yes, some still imagine Bush is a conservative rather than a radical, faithless to tradition, constitutional or other. After taking a handbagging from Laura Bush, the president appointed Harriet E. Miers to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The woman is a veteran administrator, and the president’s personal lawyer and confidante (cronyism? You don’t say!) As ominous: Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is also hot for Harriet. To say she hasn’t a discernible judicial philosophy is an understatement. But why would Bush care whether she can tell Blackstone from Bentham when he can’t? The president simply wants to ensure his appointees vote as he expects them to. Left-liberals, like Catharine Crier of Court TV, believe a judicial activist is someone who reverses precedent. George Bush thinks a judicial activist is someone who disobeys the President.
P.S. Striking down unconstitutional laws is not judicial activism. Judicial activism means 1) minting new rights not in the Constitution 2) striking down laws to comport with these freshly minted unconstitutional rights.

Update: A must read today in The Walls Street Journal is Cronyism: Alexander Hamilton wouldn’t approve of Justice Harriet Miers by Randy Barnett. Smart-alecky comments about Hamilton being a centralizer are not germane to Randy’s argument, of course. I’m only preempting the perennial libertarian red-herring harangues.

Bennett, Dowd, And The Dames From Yale

Affirmative Action, Feminism, Gender, Media, Race, The Zeitgeist

The good news first. Following “careful” capitalistic considerations, The New York Times has curtailed accessibility to its mundane columnists. If you want to read Maureen Dowd, you must sign up and pay. Yippee. About this woman’s simpering, cutesy prose the potent (Camille) Paglia said this: “Maureen Dowd—that catty, third-rate, wannabe sorority queen. She’s such an empty vessel. One pleasure of reading The New York Times online is that I never have to see anything written by Maureen Dowd! I ignore her hypertext like spam for penis extenders.” Now even if Paglia happens to click on the Dowd hypertext, it goes nowhere, unless one is willing to pay for the flaccid fluff.
Speaking of the best of distaff America, the newspaper of record reported that

“Many women at the nation’s most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time, many others… say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment.”

Girls at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton interviewed for the piece said they expected to enjoy perhaps a 10-year career, and then quit to tend their tots. Some would go back to work part time only; others not at all. The data.s reliability has been questioned, although the emerging trend is supported by “several surveys of Yale alumni and Harvard Business School graduates,” which show “the majority of women were not employed full-time 10 to 20 years after graduation.”
Parroting the individualist-feminist bromidic line, Cathy Young begs us not to ask women “to sacrifice their personal aspirations to a feminist vision of parity.” That would be “a peculiar kind of liberation.” Young pumps out banalities, but fails to get to the crux: As talented as these women are, for every one accepted into the Ivy League, an equally—or better—qualified man is rejected. That’s the way equal-opportunity admissions operate. The rejected men need the education because they’ll be working a lifetime to support women who can choose not to. Ever wonder why doctors are in short supply? Half the students admitted to medical schools are women. When kids come along, women give up the practice. Thereafter, they resume work on a part-time—or on some other highly personalized—basis. This and not discrimination is why men are frequently paid more: they’re more likely to have maintained an uninterrupted continuum of employment. Naturally, the experts at Gender Studies blame society for this “aberrant” traditionalism. They say there haven’t been efficient social changes to support the endless opportunities given to women.

“Society” is code for the pale patriarchy. That’s you, Bill Bennett. Poor Bill, he entered the lion’s den of demographics! Race baiters duly alighted on him for condemning utilitarian arguments for abortion. On his “Morning in America” radio program Bennett offered this reductio ad absurdum:

“If you wanted to reduce crime, you could—if that were your sole purpose—you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down.”

In response, the cultural cognoscenti hastened to label him a racist. Nobody was prepared to say why Bennett is a racist, though. Was it because he denounced as deplorable the idea of aborting black babies, or because his argument was premised on an unspoken truth about “the color of crime”? Instead, those who monopolize discourse in this country quickly stipulated the terms of debate. “It’s about time we discuss race honestly,” intoned the consensus keepers. But stick to the Three P’s—patriarchy, poverty, and powerlessness. Crime can be discussed as long as it is framed in bogus root-causes terms. Thus even the intrepid Bay Buchanan backed down when Donna Brazile, her CNN boxing buddy, insisted that if blacks were not so horribly and eternally disenfranchised, they would not dominate the violent-crime franchise. (What will it take, pray tell, to get whites to excel in basketball and in the 100-meter dash?)
So far the battered Bennett is holding up (Bush jumped into the ring too). One doesn’t, however, need to be a prophet to foresee a retraction in the offing. Spare yourself the burlesque and beef up your knowledge of the facts.

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.)