Posted on 08/29/2011 1:56:16 PM PDT by Da Bilge Troll
Lord of the Rings aficionados know that the evil lord Sauron paid little attention to the danger posed by two hobbits slowly struggling across the mountains and deserts of Mordor until he suddenly realized that the ring on which all his power depended was about to be hurled into the pits of Mount Doom. All at once the enemy plan became clear; what looked like stupidity was revealed as genius, and Sauron understood everything just when it was too late to act.
Jeffrey Toobin’s gripping, must-read profile of Clarence and Virginia Thomas in the New Yorker gives readers new insight into what Sauron must have felt: Toobin argues that the only Black man in public life that liberals could safely mock and despise may be on the point of bringing the Blue Empire down.
In fact, Toobin suggests, Clarence Thomas may be the Frodo Baggins of the right; his lonely and obscure struggle has led him to the point from which he may be able to overthrow the entire edifice of the modern progressive state.
Writes Toobin:
In several of the most important areas of constitutional law, Thomas has emerged as an intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. Since the arrival of Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., in 2005, and Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., in 2006, the Court has moved to the right when it comes to the free-speech rights of corporations, the rights of gun owners, and, potentially, the powers of the federal government; in each of these areas, the majority has followed where Thomas has been leading for a decade or more. Rarely has a Supreme Court Justice enjoyed such broad or significant vindication.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.the-american-interest.com ...
--snip--
In that as in so much else Pundit High prepared us to move into the liberal world of the day; we were being given exactly the ideas and opinions that would prepare us to lead the next generation of American liberalism in the New England way. Until very recently the constitutional vision I was taught in my teens remained, as they say, hegemonic. The enlarged role of the commerce clause was uncontested and the two amendments(2nd & 10th) dangled with the other dead constitutional provisions — letters of marque and reprisal, no bills of attainder, the prohibition on quartering — in constitutional limbo.
Res ipsa loquitur: A Latin term meaning the thing speaks for itself. My impression from his current essays was that he was a recent convert from the dark side.
The real problem will come if Thomas can figure out how to get the Tenth Amendment back into constitutional thought in a serious way. The Second Amendment was a constitutional landmine for the left; the Tenth is a nuclear bomb.
--snip--
Jeffrey Toobin is announcing to the liberal world that Clarence Thomas has morphed from a comic figure of fun to a determined super-villain who might reverse seventy years of liberal dominance of the federal bench and turn the clock back to 1930 if not 1789.
Amen!
Thanks for posting in News/Activism. A "Click to Add Topic" and typing editorial and one more click will let it hang in that sidebar.
Done!
Thomas was correct and Scalia was incorrect. It’s as simple as that.
He expected the bearer to be powerful. Though he may have investigated hobbits in the search as perhaps having some knowledge or involvement necessary to finding it, he could not conceive that beings so weak and humble would in fact have the Ring.
[geek critical mass achieved, pulling in more geeks]
In the long run, Clarence Thomas, not Barack Obama, will go down as the most important African-American of our era.
Thanks for posting this, it is what Rush was talking about today. I missed a little because of phone calls but now I can take my time and read it. Thanks!
Actually, I'm surprised at Scalia's concurrence on this. And disappointed. And no, I'm not a pothead and have a very low opinion of those who are. The Constitution is the Constitution, even when it's inconvenient for my preferences.
Confession.
I have never read LOTR. Don’t even want to.
“Long but well worth the read. History will place Justice Thomas among the greatest minds of our time.”
Rush talked about this article today. Very inciteful. If you heard Rush today you understand. If you did not, and have a way to hear or read it, do so.
Clarence Thomas may have the best grasp of what the founders intended in the Constitution of anyone living in the past century or two. He may be our salvation from the ravages of the left on the US Constitution.
You should also go to the original article in The New Yorker...
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_toobin
Scalia, I think, believes that to maintain the legitimacy of the Court, one must regard previous Supreme Court decisions as correct, and interpret the Constitution in such a way as to avoid contradiction. While he is more than willing to stretch to find some reason why an earlier decision isn't applicable to a case before him, he is unwilling to recognize that the Court has, on occasions, rendered decisions that were just plain illegitimate.
Does a vandal who is caught by a homeowner in the middle of the night have a right to remain alive? Some states would say yes; at least one would say no.
If a state legislature were to provide that a pregnant woman could claim "self defense" when terminating her pregnancy if it posed any risk to her well-being, and were to set the required standard of proof so low that almost any pregnancy would qualify, what basis would the federal government have for questioning the judgment of the legislature? Clearly there is some level of risk where a woman would be justified in ending a pregnancy; what would give the federal government the authority to decide where that line should be drawn?
The Ninth Amendment is also, IMHO, regarded improperly. It's often used to attack states' authority in the name of protecting invented "rights", but the real purpose was not to force the acceptance of rights which wouldn't be recognized by consensus, but rather to force continuing recognition of those rights which were so thoroughly recognized by all honest people as to hardly need mentioning, but which as time went on became "inconvenient". Something like the Kelo decision wasn't really a Fifth Amendment decision (the Fifth Amendment doesn't say takings may only be for public use, but rather that takings for such purpose require just compensation). Instead, the relevant decision was the Ninth: when the Constitution was written, only a scoundrel would have thought it proper for the government to force one person to sell his property to another. The illegitimacy of such an action would have been deemed sufficiently obvious that there was no need to expressly forbid it. A proper reading of the Ninth Amendment would recognize that the fact that the Founders neglected to expressly forbid such conduct should not be taken to imply that it's acceptable.
1. Is that a principled support of the Constitution?
2. Are there any other sections of the Constitution that you would trample, or just the Commerce Clause and Tenth Amendment?
Roe v. Wade forbids states from placing various restrictions on abortion. I see no Constitutional basis for imposing such restrictions on the states. On the other hand, I think it very unlikely that Scalia would denounce Roe v. Wade as illegitimate. Far more likely is that he would endeavor to explain why the earlier decision was correct, though perhaps incomplete; the Constitution states to impose various restrictions, but only subject to various weird complicated rules.
Which would be more likely to override the Dred Scott precedent?
Scalia? Or Thomas?
And race would have nothing to do with it...
No. A vandal—up until ‘unjust law’...should be killed or whatever if you have to protect your private property. People have always had (until recently) the right to defend their property—with the killing of life if necessary.
People were hung just for stealing a horse...why—because without a horse people could die on the frontier. Without a horse, it destroyed their ability to take care of themselves and family.
Having a baby is natural. It is what a woman’s body is designed for (Natural Law Theory)....if she makes the choice to do something which causes life, then it is her duty to raise and care for the offspring, even in the case of rape and incest. Sad. but two wrongs don’t make a right.
The primary duty of mankind is to care for their offspring and be responsible...do unto others as you would have them do unto you....that is the basis of Western Philosophy for thousands of years.
Natural Law Theory includes the teleological design of the human being and having children is necessary for the future of societies. It is considered a great sickness when mothers in the animal kingdom kill their own young. Never happens under normal, healthy times. Only human beings feel it necessary to destroy their own genetic material...it is nihilism and destroys a human being. It is evil and when we had “Just Law” abortions were never allowed in this country for hundreds of years.
We used to uphold Natural Rights according to God’s laws—the design of our Constitution and legal system.
To reduce human beings to the level of a piece of trash is the slippery slope that we are witnessing now with the degradation of women and their bodies which is so prevalent on MTV and all tv.
Women have been reduced to an ugly, disfigured, sex object-—just a commodity to be used and discarded, never treasured and loved —exactly like the baby she put in the toilet.
The reason Aragorn showed himself to Sauron in the palantir was to get Sauron to suspect that he had taken the ring himself and was going to use it in battle. So Sauron stopped looking for hobbits and fired up his war machine for a full-on preemptive strike on Gondor, which is where Aragorn’s attack would have to come from. Of course, Aragorn didn’t have the ring, but Sauron had no idea that he didn’t until it was too late to make a difference.
(There! I defy anybody to out-geek me.)
By the way, people that support Scalia's concurrence in Raich should be honest with themselves and admit that they are not conservatives. Maybe they can consider themselves social conservatives, but they are not true conservatives. True conservatives don't support the idea of a federal government exceeding its constitutional limit. If you want to ban drugs, PASS A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT. We needed one for alcohol prohibition. I think passing such an amendment would be a horrible idea, just like the prohibition amendment was, but at least they'd be following the law set forth by our Founding Fathers.
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