Common Tator, I had been hoping to meet you--were you at the March?
No I was not. Marches are not very productive.
Consider that for years a half million people have gone to Washington every year to march against abortion. Abortion is still legal. As far as I can see their Marching has had no effect. I would not expect it to have any effect.
It takes about about 80 million voters adopting a position to change the status quo. It is a long, slow time consuming process. It is done at the grass roots and involves a large effort. But public opinion is not effective in changing the actions of courts. It takes a change of justices to do that. It will be a long hard process that will take decades to achieve.
The founders of this nation made it very hard and time consuming to change things.. especially federal courts. I don't know why people always think superficial efforts will work. We have over 200 years of history proving such efforts never work.
The control of courts was lost when Chief Justice Marshall ruled that the author of the Constitution, James Madison, did not know what the words in the constitution meant. When neither James Madison, then in the cabinet, or Thomas Jefferson, who was president, challenged that ruling in Marbury Vs Madison the game was lost.
I spent a huge number of hours working on the Bush Campaign in Ohio. For some of the time I was charged with working with the media. My job was to try to influence the media's perception of what was happening in Ohio. Obviously it was successful.. Bush did win Ohio. It surprised the hell out of the Democrats.
LisaMalia and I polled door to door getting out the vote and recruiting more Bush volunteers.
What it will take to change the judiciary is not marches on the mall. There needs to be a grass roots effort to get conservative lawyers elected to low level courts. That is the first step. Then these experienced judges need to be elected to appellate and State Supreme courts.
We need to ensure that the pool of experienced judges are mostly conservative. To get good judges at the top of the food chain, we have to elect a lot of good prospects to the bottom.
It is how we took back the House of Representatives after the Democrats had held it for 40 years. We elected City Council members and County commissioners who then went on to be state senators and state Representatives. From that pool came Republican Governors. When we had the State legistlature and the Governorship we could undo the Gerrymandering that gave the House to the Democrats in every election. Ever wonder how Reagan could win 58 percent of the votes in 1984 and the Democrats sill held the house?
Today most elected Judges are liberals. And they are the pool of judges from which federal judges are selected. Supreme court justices are mostly selected from federal judges and lawyers.
Demonstrations are not very effective. They are like trying to get the Cleveland Indians to win the World Series by marching in front of the stadium. What you need is a fantastic farm club to produce great players. If the players are good enough it does not matter if anyone cheers.. they will still win the game. And if the players can't pitch or hit all the cheering in the world is to no avail.
Getting involved is a good thing. Doing things that will facilitate change is even better. If the voters had elected a judge who believed in the sanctity of life instead of Judge Greer, Terri Schiavo would be alive today. If 10 million people had marched in Washington 3 years ago would Judge Greer have been defeated? Would any of the marchers back then even known who he was?
Expecting higher level judges to overrule the power of lower level justices is like expectiong alcoholics to limit the supply of booze.