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.