Posted on 12/07/2004 5:28:08 PM PST by RWR8189
Who sits on the Supreme Court for life may be more important than who sits in the White House for four years. With vacancies to fill among federal judges in general and vacancies expected to occur on the aging Supreme Court in particular, the stakes are very high in the judicial appointments made in the next few years. We and our children will be living with the consequences for a long time.
This looks like an opportunity that may come just once in a lifetime to make judicial appointments that will stop the courts' dangerous pattern of continually eroding away the voting public's right to govern themselves through their elected representatives.
Both political parties understand the historic high stakes in these appointments. Senate Democrats have dug in and refused to allow some judicial nominees even to be voted on by the full Senate because these were judges who believe in applying the written law, not imposing judges' personal notions as the law of the land.
With the agenda of the political left increasingly rejected by voters at the polls, the only way to get the items on that agenda enacted into law is to have judges who will decree the liberal agenda from the bench. Too many judges have already done that on everything from gay marriage to racial quotas and the death penalty.
It is not these or other particular issues which are the highest stakes. The highest stakes are democratic self-governance versus judicial fiats that threaten to make a mockery of the American system of government by elected officials.
Some Republican Senators are considering reacting to the Democrats' obstruction of judicial nominees by a change in the Senate rules that would no longer allow a minority of Senators to prevent the majority from voting on these nominees.
Putting in this rule change to stop the filibustering of judicial nominees would be a long overdue show of backbone on the part of the Republican Senators. But George Will's column in the December 8th issue of Newsweek argues that this is a bad idea.
Putting a stop to filibustering judicial nominees could mean sliding down a "slippery slope" toward declaring "the illegitimacy of filibusters generally," according to Will. But, after more than two centuries of American history, it is not at all obvious what benefit this country has ever received from filibusters.
It is all too easy to recall how Southern Democrats for decades blocked attempts to give blacks basic civil rights by filibustering such legislation in the Senate. That was surely not our country's finest hour.
Filibusters, like judicial activism, make a mockery of the voter's right to self-governance. Both are ways for a willful minority to block the majority.
As for slippery slopes, we are already on a very slippery slope toward irreversible laws created by judicial activists. Even judges who respect the Constitution as it was written and legislation as it was passed also respect judicial precedents.
Conservative judges are not inclined to reverse long-standing precedents on which millions of people have relied, even if these judges think the original decision should not have been made the way it was. With activist judges guided only by their own ideology and conservative judges reluctant to overturn precedents, the agenda of the left is easy to enact from the bench and hard to dislodge afterward.
If both the liberal agenda and the whole process of judicial lawlessness that serves it are ever to be stopped, Senate Republicans will have to face the question that Ronald Reagan used to ask: "If not us, who -- and if not now, when?"
George Will warns that someday the Republicans will be in the minority and Democrats can then use the proposed rule change to keep them from blocking legislation they don't like. But judicial nominations are too fundamental an issue, at a time when we stand at a legal crossroads, to worry that a rule change will, in effect, escalate the political arms race.
The alternative to this political arms race is to stay disarmed in the face of a ruthless adversary who recognizes no limits of propriety or even decency, as their treatment of Judge Robert Bork and Judge Clarence Thomas amply demonstrated long ago.
Sure does. The use of a real, old-time filibuster is something the dems won't have a stomach for. I think it would be good strategy for the GOP to simply move to institute the old rules: "Sure," they'd say, "you can have your filibuster on our judicial nominees. In fact, we welcome it."
Now you go beyond the slippery slope into the pit of mob rule.
This is like having two wolves and a lamb voting on the dinner menu. A broad enough 'gimme' bill will leave the rest of us out in the cold, and all sorts of amendments like summarily executing cigarette smokers, or doubling property tax on single family dwellings, or making all firearms illegal, could be tacked on.
Sure there are risks - like having John Kerry run for president against George Bush. And, even though an astonishing majority of Americans have no clue about budgets, economics and the like, I have reached the point at which I trust the American voter to do the right thing much more than I trust the lying thieves we elected to represent our interests.
Plus, it would likely force Congress to reveal all of those "off-the-table" items that fund shadow agencies and schemes that we aren't supposed to know about but pay for.
This stuff has got to stop. And, since our elected representatives don't want to do the job we sent them to WA., DC to do, we'll do it for them and take back some of the extraordinary salary they award themselves.
That's captalism and business at work!! And the members of Congress need to learn about those things.
IMHO, the American voter mix is about 2.5% off of being idiots, and the other half feel similarly.
The grave danger, however, is if you put a measure up which said that everyone else would make double what white males do, (including white women), what are the chances it would NOT pass? Zip, zilch, nada. The 51% female vote would pretty much clinch things.
There are very good reasons why everything does not come up for a popular vote.
That said, I agree there is a need for reform.
How about this (for a start):
1: A bill can only deal with one subject. No tacking on pork gimmies, no riders unless they deal with the subject of the bill. A highway bill deals with highways and their funding, period.
2: For every law passed, two must be repealed.
3: The authors of the bill shall write quizzes on the substantitive portions of the measure. Any legislator unfamilliar with the measure is disqualified from voting on it.
4:The bill shall be provided in current written and/or electronic form at least three weeks prior to voting on the measure. The full text of the bill with links to pertinent laws shall be made available to the public online, and an open online forum provided for rational comment/critique by the public, who just might be more familliar with the impact of a specific measure than the Congress.
It would surprise the bejeebers out of me if even one third of the Congress knew the measures they vote on or their potential impact.
I'll say.
Seven out of the nine seated are Republican appointments and we still have a Court we're scared to death of!
We now have a great opportunity, but we sure better keep our fingers crossed.
Great ideas, just add a breathalyser test to each prospective voter within 10 minutes of the vote with the results published on the web within 10 minutes after!
Actually, if you go back to my original post, I did (and do) advocate the repeal of the 17th Amendment (the one that fundamentally altered our government from a representative republic to a democracy (AKA mob rule!).
Still, we agree on many points and share the same ideas; only the approach is a little different.
I'm all for that! But fat Teddy would have to go through DTs to vote.
As that goes, you have to pass drug screening to drive a bus or operate an oil rig, why isn't it required to run a country?
If the peons have to pee, they should, too.
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