Free Republic

Mr. Justice Thomas and Matters of Principle by William Murchison Posted Jun 25, 2003 It's all a matter of tailoring, see? -- wide vs. narrow, as in lapels. Narrow is the rage this season at the U.S. Supreme Court. A "narrowly tailored" admissions plan for boosting minority enrollment at the University of Michigan Law School? A 5-4 majority of justices beamed. Such a plan advances "a compelling interest in obtaining the educational benefits that flow from a diverse student body." Ah, but what about a plan that awards minority applicants 20 resume-padding points when they apply for undergraduate work at...

White House Throws Principle Out Window June 10, 2003 We spent the first hour of Monday's program on the idea that we're going to extend the child tax credit to families that don't pay taxes. Many of you told me that I was making a huge mistake opposing this. If you think you're conservatives, you have a long way to go, because what some of you people were saying is not conservative at all. It's purely political. However, I have to hand it to you people. You were right in one sense. The White House is leaning on reluctant Republican...

Why? The other day, my nine year old son wanted to know why we were at war. My husband looked at our son and then looked at me. My husband and I were in the Army during the Gulf War and we would be honored to serve and defend our country again today. I knew that my husband would give him a good explanation. My husband thought for a few minutes and then told my son to go stand in our front living room window. He told him: "Son, stand there and tell me what you see?" "I see trees...

Summary: It's not moral authority that the United Nations supplies, but merely social pressure to conform. [CAPITALISM MAGAZINE.COM] Thomas Friedman writes to Andrew Sullivan: Why is it that liberals, such as myself, who were ready to support the war, so desperately wanted U.N. approval for it? It was for a couple of reasons--one that is already apparent and one that will become more apparent. First, because this is such a huge, unprecedented task, taking over a whole country half a world away, that the more international legitimacy we had going in, the more time and space we would have to...

Canadians can be forgiven for thinking Jean Chrétien sets his position on Iraq with a daily spin of a carnival wheel. After saying Monday that Canada "will not participate" in the current war because it is "not justified," the PM declared Thursday it is the Americans' "right" to invade Iraq -- and that Canadians "respect that." This latest quasi-reversal offered more proof the PM's shifting stance is based on political expedience -- not principle. The flip-flops began last year. When asked in September what evidence might prompt Canada to join in the forcible ouster of Saddam, Mr. Chrétien replied famously,...

Don't call them principled. They're not. And don't call them ideologues. They wouldn't know an ideology from a par-boiled turnip. They protest. They demonstrate. They've disrupted metropolitan traffic in Boston, San Francisco, and several other cities. A few have engaged in violent vandalism against others' property. But they have yet to articulate precisely why the American campaign against Saddam Hussein and his Baathist dictatorship has them so exercised -- unless we accept "we don't like it" as the response. Most people, be it frankly said, aren't all that good with abstractions and reasoning. Most of our actions are propelled by...

In general elections should a person vote for a candidate or his party affiliation? There are various reasonable arguments that can be proposed to justify voting in either manner. Perhaps it would be well to look at the motivation for voting in general. One would think the motivation would be to vote for someone who would act in a manner, if elected, to advance those principles that would most closely relate to those that the voter himself held. These principles providing the basis on which the functioning of the government would result in providing the benefits desired by the voter....

Two months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision of sweeping legal consequence, relying not on the Constitution's text but on national public opinion polls. In declaring the death penalty for mentally retarded inmates to be cruel and unusual punishment, the high court rooted its decision in a recent trend among states to spare the retarded from execution. It was not the first time the court had considered this issue. Just 13 years earlier, the court reached exactly the opposite outcome on precisely the same question, holding that executing the mentally retarded didn't violate the Eighth Amendment. Whether...