I Hear [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
decent rumors that U.S. marshals have been assigned to Diane Wood.
You know this is bad when Ed Whelan writes, as he did in Part 1 of his series on her:
Ill ... highlight Woods plain defiance of the Supreme Courts initial order of reversal and her resort to a legal argument so flimsy that that the Court unanimously rejected it.
Supreme Court Candidate Diane Wood [Ed Whelan]
Kathryn: Id be wary of reading too much into rumors that U.S. marshals have been assigned to Seventh Circuit judge, and Supreme Court candidate, Diane Wood. But since youve kindly highlighted my posts on Wood, let me offer this summary:
Wood is a hard-left judicial activist and aggressor on culture-war issues:
· Wood is clearly ready to invent a constitutional right to same-sex marriage: The right not to have the State prescribe a set of acceptable spouses, in the absence of the kind of powerful reason it would have for incest laws or laws designed to protect children, is implicit in the concept of liberty. (Wood, Reflections on the Judicial Oath (8 Green Bag 2d 177, 184 (2005).)
· Wood evidently believes that the inclusion of under God in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the Establishment Clause and that a Supreme Court ruling permitting that phrase would announce that the United States is a nation that has adopted monotheism as its official state dogma. (See my Part 5 post, point 3 here.)
· Wood believes that its proper for the Supreme Court to revise the meaning of constitutional provisions to reflect contemporary international and foreign practices. (See my Part 5 post, point 2.) As Harold Kohs transnationalism shows, that approach threatens cherished First Amendment rights of free speech and religion at the same time that it leads to the invention of new rights that entrench the agenda of international leftist elites.
· No judge whom Im aware of is more extreme than Wood on abortion. Her defiance of the Supreme Courts mandate in NOW v. Scheidler (and her incurring successive 8-1 and 8-0 reversals by the Court) ought alone to be disqualifying. In addition, Wood has (in dissent) voted to strike down state laws banning partial-birth abortion and (again in dissent) voted to strike down an Indiana informed-consent law that was in all material respects identical to the law upheld by the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Wood is aggressive in pursuing her ideological agenda. Her willful lawlessness on remand in NOW v. Scheidler is the starkest example. But consider also her behavior at oral argument in a case presenting the question whether a law school violated the rights of a Christian Legal Society chapter by revoking its official status as a student organization because of the chapters membership policies. Wood viciously maintained that the CLS chapter viewed homosexuals as less than fully human, conspicuously turned her back on CLS counsel as he explained CLSs orthodox Christian beliefs, and turned back around to exclaim Goodness!
In his Notre Dame speech last week, President Obama encouraged fair-minded words and opposed reducing those with differing views to caricature. Thats hardly what Woods conduct in the CLS case demonstrates.
More broadly, President Obama says that he wants to find common ground on abortion and other culture-war issues, and he says that he opposes same-sex marriage. If so, he wouldnt nominate Diane Wood to the Supreme Court.
Wow, she sounds like a doozie.
And far from judicial material. It is pretty horrifying that she is on ANY court.
I thought they struck down Casey, that it was the beginning of O'Connor's hard turn the left and the beginning of her time as decision broker. What the heck case am I thinking of?