Posted on 11/09/2004 2:50:48 PM PST by USNA74
Once they start ignoring the law because no one can stop them, the question is where will they stop? The Bush administration has been trying to ignore the Supreme Court's lawlessness and violation of separation of powers just like it has been trying to ignore the fact that Iran is making war on us. It only takes one side to make war, and it only takes one side to create a constitutional crisis.
We have both right now whether or not the Bush administration admits it. When will they fight back? And how much damage will the Supremes and mullahs do to us until then?
Maybe he's gonna go back to start fundraising and getting ideas for the George W. Bush Presidential Library. Somehow I don't think they'll have as much trouble getting a location as x42 did.
Scalia is anything but a leader. He's a nasty, vicious, crank. The best which can be said of him is that he is a brilliant jerk with issues.
I prefer Ashcroft's viewpoint to the second amendment to Guiliani's.
Bookmarking an interesting discussion.
I know Giuliani is tough when it comes to crime fighting- his experience against the mob would be a big help in the War on Terrorism. The differences I meant were social policy issues. Ashcroft is staunchly pro-life and pro-traditional marriage. Giuliani is the opposite. Would Giuliani attempt to enforce the partial birth abortion ban (if the courts let him)?
John Ashcroft served Missouri and our country well. May God continue to Bless John and his family.
Lawyers switching sides when they are appointed to a government position is normal. I listened to a criminal law lecture by an LA judge who had been, as a Los Angeles deputy district attorney, the county's chief anti-gang prosecutor. He gave lectures to police and sheriffs on how to write search warrant applications using weasel words so as to get a judge to sign them when the real truth would have caused the judge to limit the warrants' scope. His first job after being appointed a judge was to review all the search warrants submitted for most of LA. By cops who had attended his lectures. The presiding judge knew exactly what was going when he made that appointment. He knew this newly appointed judge would see through all the dodges he had taught.
So Rudy would be a dynamite federal AG, but I'd prefer that he replace Rehnquist as Chief Justice, and agree with others that Rudy would be better as Homeland Security secretary than AG. Rudy's adminstrative skills are much more needed at Homeland Security than in the Justice Department.
http://www.nationalreview.com/mccarthy/mccarthy200411100848.asp
"... There are, essentially, two competing visions of judicial philosophy. The first, the one that is regnant at this time (and to which it appears Senator Specter subscribes), is that the Constitution — with its many pliable terms — is as manipulable as necessary to place beyond democracy any issue that may be said to reflect a "value" the American people revere at a given time. The problem here is that this camouflages a brute power reality.In truth, the American people have very few values which enjoy such broad consensus that, given the choice, our society would enshrine them in our Constitution and render them immune from further popular consideration, regardless of evolving attitudes or changed circumstances. Constitutional protection, we must admit, is a forbidding carapace — one need look no further than the contortions engaged in by would-be reformers when values incontestably engraved in the Constitution, like free speech and bearing arms, collide with innovative schemes like campaign finance and gun control.
It is a commonplace for judicial opinions to couch various concerns in extravagant rhetoric about values claimed to be venerated by all Americans. Yet, at bottom, this reflects nothing more or less than the subjective preferences of a majority (often a bare, fractious majority) of judges — whose views about social issues, even if they masquerade as legal issues, should be of no greater moment than what the people of, say, Bayonne or Des Moines think about abortion, or gay marriage, or stem-cell research.
The second school of thought holds merely this: that judges are not supreme. It contends that there are firm, objective limits to the areas of life that jurists may remove from the democratic self-determination of the American people. They are found in the text of the Constitution as it was originally understood at the time its provisions were adopted. They do not change over time or with passing fancies. This philosophy is erected on an unchanging premise: In a democracy, it is to be presumed that great social conflicts will be resolved democratically. That presumption is not beyond rebuttal, but for it to be overcome there must be unmistakable proof that the dispute at issue was removed from democratic consideration by the Constitution."
My point is that the same judicial philosophy which brought us Roe v. Wade is now causing the judiciary to attack the Constitutional separation of powers concerning the President's war powers. It brought us Rasul v. Bush and now this Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling.
Judicial activists are merging the war against terror with the struggle against abortion. I am saying that these guys are forcing an alliance between social conservatives and war hawks who used to be Democrats who do not agree with social conservatives on social issues (me, Governor Shwarzenegger, the "Scoop Jackson" Democrats, etc.)
You social conservatives have an opportunity if you have the wit to grasp it.
Exactly.
To put it in layman terms, the first concept is the liberal left's notion that the Constitution is a 'living, breathing' document which changes according to the 'needs' of society and it's people; while the second concept described is a strict constructionist view - it is what it is and means what is says, no more and no less.
The strict constructionist view is the only proper way to understand the Constitution - otherwise it can not be the Supreme Law of the Land.
I guess it depends on what the meaning of is 'is'. hehe
My kind. The kind that reads. The kind that looks at policy preferences and compares them to other policy preferences, notices how they cluster, and puts the clusters in different binboxes.
The kind that does political sociology, like the Pew Center did. In broad terms, it works, just like personality typing works, and for similar reasons, and in similar ways: in broad, aggregate terms which nevertheless pretty well describe the electorate and the parties that work for their votes.
Any questions?
I'll settle for a brilliant strict-constructionist conservative, but whom do you like, and why?
As in Bill Clinton's famous mot, "Find me a way around the Fourth Amendment."
Exactly, applying broad aggregates to an individual ignores the atypical. It's silly.
To quote a famous Greek philosopher, "No way in hell!"
The 'Rats lost the election. No way do we give them a New York liberal at the apex of the national judicial system. No way!!
Remember, Earl Warren was a liberal Republican, too! And how about Souter? Jeez Louise!
Give me a break!
And tell me how he's going to back us up on RKBA when the chips are down and the 'Rats have got a registration bill going, three years from now, with Hillary looking down our throat.
Tell me how he's going to go to the mat for heterosexual marriage, and how he hasn't been playing to lose on this issue since he was governor of Texas (watch out -- I've got backup for my position!).
Show me an issue, or an area, in which he diverges sharply with the group he was born into -- Andover, Yale, Bones, Harvard Biz -- and keeps faith instead with Christian conservative secretaries making $26,000/year. Immigration? English-only? Home schooling? Thowing the 'Rats out of education? Abolishing the Energy and Education Departments? Shrinking government? Fighting the ACLU and their persecutory lawsuits? Fighting the NAACP on their bloody-shirt Confederate-flag buncombe? Rolling back affirmative action to pre-Backe colorblindness?
Go on, show me. I'm from Missouri today.
I'd also consider a really good senior military judge advocate who has worked on implementing the proposed terrorist tribunals, because the Supremes have shown they are clueless about the real world effects of their decisions on the normal criminal justice system. Apparently the only way they can figure such things out is when one of their own has worked in such a field - Rehnquist valued Justice Thurgood Marshall's insight into litigation based on Marshall's vast litigation experience. There is no way the Supremes can give us anything reasonable concerning the novel concept of military tribunal trials of terrorists unless one of the justices has actual experience in that field. At the moment that means a JAG.
Beyond that I'd want justices with something like Ashcroft's background - former state attorney generals who had also served as a U.S. Senator or state governor. The Supremes as a group are notably lacking in real world experience and judgment.
But for Chief Justice we need someone with proven leadership ability, and there Guliani has no peers among those with the requisite legal background. He's a better administrator than a lawyer (and his record shows he is a very, very, capable attorney), but his leadership ability is amazing. He can do the country the most good as Chief Justice.
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