Posted on 10/30/2005 2:07:24 PM PST by nosofar
The celebration of Rosa Parks's extraordinary contribution to America presents an excellent opportunity for me to summon all the strength at my command so that I may shout at the top of my lungs: "Thank God Almighty for liberal judicial activism." I suppose this makes me a heretic in a town where radical right dogma reigns supreme, especially after the trashing of White House counsel and now-withdrawn Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers. But I'll still pay tribute to activist judges. After all, it was a default by elected leaders that led an "activist" Supreme Court to decide in 1956 that it was unconstitutional to require that Rosa Parks and other black passengers in Montgomery, Ala., sit at the back of buses solely because of their race.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
http://corner.nationalreview.com/
Oh we all know the Supreme Court has a stellar record on the issue of race. /sarcasm
All he's trying to do is water down the term "judicial activism".
Dittos.
If the court consulted "foreign law" to determine if the law in Alabama was "unconstitutional", then they may be been "judicial activists" but I doubt they did.
(As pointed out in the first post, the case referred to in the article is not an example of judicial activism.)
Nor, does King write about the Southern Democratic Party politics that lead to the establishment of laws that required separate seating on buses in the first place.
It wasn't Southern Republicans that implemented separate seating laws back then.
I can name one case that has happened in this decade in which conservatives actually were hoping for judicial activism and the activism was wanted for a law that was passed in the Congress and signed by this President.
While I abhor Jim Crow and segregationist laws, their eradication does not justify overlooking the constitutional limitations placed on the Judiciary. First we do the wrong thing for the right reasons. From there, it's a small step to doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. And by then, precedent has been established and wrong law becomes the law of the land.
And it wasn't democrats who passed the civil rights act.
I'm in favor of judicial activism when it simply applies the law. Near as I can tell, though, this is first and only time in history that has happened.
Yeah, gotta love that Supreme Court. It only took them 60+ years to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson and we had to fight a war to overturn Scot v. Sanford! You go, judicial activism!/sarcasm
It takes activism to put down activism, to correct a wrong.
They don't just automagically correct themselves.
Which gets buried. I think the big problem at the time was that Berry Goldwater, the main Republican name, opposed it (corrct me if I'm wrong) so opposition was linked with the Republican Party as a whole.
I don't know about Goldwater but southern democrats opposed it and it would never have passed without Republicans voting for it.
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