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Here is a rant I published a couple of months ago lamenting both the corruption of the confirmation process and the corruption of the judicial process by liberal judges, some of whom were here shown to be venal as well as misguided:

We are getting perilously close to something other than a democratic representative government, circumscribed by a written constitution, as interpreted by honest jurists.

Here are a collection of my comments made over time which are quite lengthy and their reproduction has a tinge of self-absorption. Skip them if you like:

Our system works on the notion of stare decisis which has come to mean the encrustation of baby steps away from the plain meaning of the constitution. My fear is that the process has gone irretrievably far. The encrustation is so complete that plainly unconstitutional opinions like Roe v Wade not only become a bulwark against original constitutional meaning, they become themselves an independent justification for further mischief, such as the sodomy cases.
I posted this:

The significance of these recent Supreme Court decisions (Sodomy; quotas) is as follows, and they are, without exception, ominous:

1. The battle over states' rights, 138 years after Appomattox and 49 years after the court ordered school integration, is finally, conclusively, over. There are no more states' rights and it is only a matter of time until the court gets around to picking off the remaining vestiges of states' powers one by one. I stand by this despite the guns at schools ruling).

2. The idea of the written constitution as a social contract is dead. It has now morphed into a manifesto which can accommodate groups' rights as they come into favor.

3. The idea that law, constitutional law, should be dominant in ordering the affairs of men is now dead and in its place we will governed by a cocktail of sociology, anthropology, psychology, and pop culture.

4. The unwritten Confession of Faith shared by our Justices for generations in which they conceive themselves in spirit to be LEGAL arbiters operating within a LEGAL system and according to its rules has been tacitly abandoned, although its vocabulary has been retained to conceal the metamorphis, and the Justices now have assumed a new role as Shamans, Priesters, Oracles or something quite different which has yet to be fully revealed.

5. The legal system will cease to be a place where rights are vindicated and become a source for the establishment of INTERESTS. To attain the establishment of his interests, the clever advocate will see that the Gods of the new system will have to be propitiated. This means that successful advocates will have established their cause as the flavor of the month in an ever-changing menu of fads, movements, and the like.

6. Resort to the Constitution will be an empty exercise resorted to by fools who do not know how the real game is actually being played. At the risk of quoting myself, here is what I posted that reflects how I feel:

I view this venal corruption as the inevitable result of the intellectual, procedural and constitutional corruption which the left has insinuated into our legal system.

The left has wrenched our polity away from the constitution, pettifogging its plain meaning. It has used judges to accomplish this.

It has undermined democracy by converting political issues like abortion or sodomy into legal/constitutional questions. It has used judges to accomplish this.

It has made a mindless parlour game of gotcha out of the criminal justice system, substituting a gauntlet of obstacles which the prosecution must negotiate in place of the quest for truth. It has used judges to accomplish this.

It has established favored groups and disestablished other less favored Americans not only as they interact with their government but privately, as in matters of free association or job quotas. They have used judges to accomplish this.

The left has corrupted the process of selecting judges. First, by character assasination as against Bork and then Thomas. Now, by filibustering their way to a super majority. It is not original to observe that this was the predictable result of politicising the judicial system.

The left has attempted to control elections through judicial fiat as in the Florida Supreme Court with its palpable bias in the election matter. Or in California where the courts overturned a successful referendum on policy grounds. Or in Arizona where a court usurped the budget making powers. Likewise in Pa. They used judges to accomplish all of this.

And it was equally predictable that quite soon the judges themselves would start jiggering their own system. The left has made the stakes too high to leave the answers to the rules of procedure. So we see the assignment judge playing games in the Clinton affair. We see the circuit court jobbing the system in the affirmative action cases. This happens precisely because the left made them judges to get their agenda into the books, not to concern themselves with so abstract a notion as "justice." So leftist judges become corrupt in the administration of their own courts.

Now we see venal corruption. This was also to be foreseen. Why should greed stand as the lone taboo in a sea of sin and political opportunism? Just where should the whore say, "no, that far I will not go." http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/958376/posts?page=8#8

In short, I fear the rot is so pervasive, so institutionalised, that not even nominating the right horses can retrieve the situation. I sincerely hope I am wrong. My pessimism does not imply that we should not try -it is all we have left before the barricades