Posted on 07/04/2003 11:08:49 AM PDT by azturk
I am getting so tired of the silly A## "The Constitution doesn't guarantee the right to (insert right here)" argument!!!!! The Constitution didn't give us our rights!!! We are endowed with certain inalienable rights by our CREATOR Not the government! Not the Constitution! This was addressed in the 9th amendment:
The enumeration of certain rights in the Constitution should not be constured to deny or disparage others retained by the people
I do so wish that people that want to write about constitutional law would actually read the Constitution!!!
That being said I agree that the desicion regarding raced based addmissions completley ignored the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. The really interesting thing was that the justices sited the very same amendment that they had previously trampled, to uphold (rightly so in my belief) the overturning of the the Texas sodomy law on the grounds that it violated said amendment.
As for the california case: As vile as it may seem the USSC upheld its duty, as it did in the decision regarding the Florida Supreme's court usurping legislative power in 2000, and decided that you simply can't change the rules in the middle of the game. ex post facto laws protect affect us all as they provide the government with additional tools to criminalize certain actions after the fact and prosecute as if the action had been criminal all along.
" Fingers going faster than thoughts.
But then, there's a "gutless" problem within most all politicians; so we probably won't see anything other than "same old, same old."
We laughed, and wisely derided them for their idiotic impeachment fantasy.
Now the proverbial shoe is on the other foot (and by a wider margin) and I can't help but feel that we are found wanting. After the last two years of nearly relentless victory in the political arena we suffer one setback and a great whine from the right is heard throughout the nation. Like the sound of a pathetic foghorn it drives away the vast "Will & Grace" watching center of the political spectrum on whom we depend to keep this excellent political shift moving. It makes us look stupid, it makes us look cruel, and above all it wastes our time and energy on an issue that's NOT THAT FRIGGING IMPORTANT!
So pretty please, with sugar on top, quit whining and turn your attention to something worthwhile. The election perhaps?
For all intents and purposes, a judge is a judge (an officer of the Court of Law) no matter what he's rank, and ,yes, he (or she) can be impeached.
The question is: What is an impeachable offense? Treason, of course, is one but voting in favor of "gay rights"is not treason. Then there are the charges of "high crimes and misdemeners" (sp??) but again, voting in favor of "gay rights" is neither as it is not againt the law to vote the way they did.
P.S. Neat graphic! Is that supposed to be Bandit from Johnny Quest?
A huge understatement.
Of the three rulings, this one's the most tricky. I don't know if Farah actually read the ruling, or if he just read accounts of it, but it's not entirely without justification. Changing the statute of limitation after the time of the alleged offense is, in a strict sense, an ex post facto law.
Earlier in the column, he said, "In the first case, in a 5-4 ruling, the justices found the 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause really doesn't mean what it says." But I'm afraid he seems to be asking the court to declare that the ex-post-facto clause doesn't mean what it says.
This nation has never been so polarized politically in my lifetime--not even during the 1960s during the anti-war demonstrations. It is polarized in large part because SCOTUS has usurped the legislative process time and time again leaving people on both of sides of important issues no effective way of coping with the change. There is almost no way to control the SCOTUS superlegislature apart from trying to divine what each SCOTUS candidate's personal likes and predelictions are ahead of time in interminable and highly heated Senate Judiciary Committee hearings.
That such an ENORMOUS amount of time and energy is invested vetting a SCOTUS nominee's personal background and "litmus test" quirks and opinions should be a red-flag tip-off to all of us that something is terribly wrong and out of kilter in a constitutional sense in the breadth and range of power that SCOTUS justices have arrogated unto themselves. It was not always so. Our fear, largely unspoken because it is only vaguely sensed by most of us is: "This potential justice, guided by his prejudices and whims, will exercise absolute and unreviewable control for life over my local, state, and federal elected officials, rendering my vote for representative government a nullity. If the 'wrong' justice gets in, I'm screwed personally and forever. I can't let the 'wrong' justice get in!"
If SCOTUS still acted within its original strict constitutional bounds, Senate Judiciary Committee SCOTUS-nominee vettings would be third-page material in local newspapers. The real action would be taking place in the state and local precincts, wards, and legislatures--where it belongs--where the citizens believe they can effect change by participating in the great experiment of self-government.
This activist SCOTUS is a symptom of nanny government run amok. I don't care where you stand on the Lawrence sodomy issue personally. Action on such legislation should have taken place locally, with all due deliberation, at a state level--not impatiently imposed by judical fiat. If it was important enough to be dealt with on a national level, it should have been subjected to the process of constitutional amendment--as slavery was.
Some defenders of judicial activism point out Brown v. Board of Education as "good" example of judicial activism. But there is no such thing as "good" judicial activism--no matter how exemplary the result in a particular case. Let loose from its constitutional constraints, SCOTUS is nothing more than a black-robed nine-headed tyrant, benevolent one day and cruel the next, but a tyrant nonetheless. And when people are ruled by a tyrant they cannot vote out of office what do they do? They either drop out of the political process altogether because they know their voices will not be heard, or they become identified as troublemakers by agents of the tyrant and the full force of federal governmental power and censure is brought to bear on them. Pro-life demonstrators know this very well.
That is what we need to do, focus our attention on our local elections, that is where we have to start if this mess is to be cleaned up.
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