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To: JRios1968

You give a poor example, but you're right. Liberals only defend the precedents they like. However, considering all precedents, liberal and conservative, should be important for a conservative judge. The fact that liberals don't do that is no reason at all to do the same.


27 posted on 08/12/2005 6:07:31 AM PDT by DoraC (Islam is no peaceful religion.)
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To: DoraC
You see, you're still not quite getting it. Following precedent just for the sake of following precedent, ("why, that's the way it's always been done around here!") without thinking, is not just dangerous, it leads us to a tyranny of the courts (come to think of it...) The Constitution is not the "living, breathing" document the Libs would have us believe it is. Human condition IS a "living, breathing" thing, though. Just because a Court in 1850, or 1973, or last week, ruled in a specific manner, should not tie the hands of everyone coming after that time. Times change, people change, circumstances change. The United States at the time of Dred Scott, or Plessy or Roe v Wade, was very different from the United States today, and so, judgements from the Court on those cases, if they were re-opened would likely be very different nowadays...except for the precious "precedent".
29 posted on 08/12/2005 6:18:45 AM PDT by JRios1968 (If you can't laugh at yourself, someone else will do it for you.)
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To: DoraC

You're in effect saying that conservatives are obligated to protect liberal precedents, otherwise we're just as bad as they are. I don't understand that logic.

We know that liberals have no problem with overturning precedents they don't like. We also know they don't give a damn about the Constitution. All that motivates them is their ideology.

So, following your advice, a pack of liberal judges could mow down dozens of precedents with no constitutional justification. Then, after years of work to get strict constructionists appointed, we'd be told that to overturn all those unconstitutional liberal rulings would be an attack on precedent that would be just as ugly as the one the liberal activists engaged in. So the new supposedly conservative majority on the court would uphold all those dozens of rulings based on stare decisis.

Of course, years later when the liberals regain control, they'd go right back to freely overturning all the precedents that they don't like.

Where's the logic in that?


34 posted on 08/12/2005 6:34:26 AM PDT by puroresu (Conservatism is an observation; Liberalism is an ideology)
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