The Extremism of Brown's Critics

Investors Business Daily ^ | May 4, 2005 | Op/Ed

[JBW]

Ever wonder just what it is about Janice Rogers Brown that prompted the Democrats to so fiercely oppose her nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals? It's her radical position on the Constitution.

Or rather, it's her dedication to constitutional limits that has enraged the left. They don't want anyone on the bench who might get in the way of federal policies and programs that can't withstand constitutional scrutiny.

Brown, the African-American daughter of an Alabama sharecropper, happens to believe the Supreme Court's protection of the government's expansion of the 1930s was "the triumph of our own socialist revolution."

California Supreme Court Justice Brown says that same enlargement of Washington's power "inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document."

Tough words. No wonder Brown is getting rough treatment in the Senate and media.

She dares to utter what has become obvious to many — that when it comes to governing, collectivism, not constitutionalism, is often the guiding principle.

The left will scratch, bite and claw to beat down any judge who believes, and is willing to say, that the federal government is a "leviathan" that's "crushing everything in its path," as Brown has. Those holding such views see Brown's refusal to accept more taxes and spending to feed the leviathan as proof of her judicial activism.

***

Brown is more than a constitutional rabble-rouser. As a woman of faith, she is a multiple offender. Worse, she mixes her faith with her ideas about personal liberty.

[JBW]

Nearly two hundred years ago, surveying the wreckage of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke argued that, by abandoning their historical sense of government and by replacing it with an abstract ideology built on the "Rights of Man", the French doomed their revolution to failure.

The aggregated learnings of history had developed a working constitution that balanced the interests of parties and gave the state and its citizens an understanding of their rights, Burke held. Abandoning historical understanding and building government on an abstract theory left both the state and the people vulnerable to the whims of ideology.

Burke was proved right when the White Terror swept across France, leaving thousands dead at the guillotines.

Brown's warnings are woven from the same cloth as Burke's.

More: http://www.jonathanbwilson.com/2005.05.01_arch.html#1115207170752