Your Fred could have said qoute actually is the Fred Thompson position, as far as I understand it. But you won’t find it expressed that way in one compact sound bite.
John Valentine wrote:
Your Fred could have said qoute actually is the Fred Thompson position, as far as I understand it. But you won’t find it expressed that way in one compact sound bite.
. x . x . x .
If Senator Thompson believes that protecting federalism means allowing one or more states to adopt abortion (post-Roe v. Wade), thereby violating the singlemost basic human right secured by the United States Constitution, then what I stated is not his position.
As I said, the importance of federalism trumps nearly everything — but it doesn’t trump the most basic human rights.
If, next year, one of the 50 states enacted a law allowing parents to kill (for whatever reasons) any of their children under the age of seven years, the federal government would be constitutionally obliged to step in and protect that child’s civil rights, federalism be damned.
If abortion is murder — and the decision-making devolves back to the states, the same thing would apply.
At present, it’s the federal government (courts) preventing the states from making abortion illegal. Reversing the error doesn’t address the violation of rights. It merely rips the unborn child from the womb with the left hand rather than the right.
Some conservatives forget that federalism is not itself a goal. It is a means — a means to protecting the rights of the people. It permits them to also govern themselves in a somewhat parallel manner at the state level. That provides some balance against the massive power of the federal government.
If federalism is worshipped as a goal and not a means, it can come into conflict with the very goal it was meant to help secure and protect.
I find that some pro-abortion Republicans like to hide behind the fig leaf of federalism as if it, in and of itself, is sacred. It’s not. What’s sacred is what federalism is intended to protect. And that is what makes federalism so very important — but its importance is derived.
Federalism is like a individual standing guard at Fort Knox. The security guard isn’t what’s valuable. The gold is what’s valuable. We wouldn’t even need the guard if the gold wasn’t valuable and human nature so corrupt that the gold is threatened. As a result, the guard becomes very important.
And Sen. Thompson’s sound bite was not compact. It was fairly long and rambling as he tried to find the trail of bread crumbs that would lead him back out of the forest into which he had wandered. He didn’t make it out of the woods. He kept stumbling through the maze until he arrived at a gingerbread house with a big sign over it that read: “The doctrine of federalism trumps the right to life.”
That said, I would prefer him to some of the other candidates.