Posted on 04/28/2014 4:28:13 AM PDT by Kaslin
Based upon Justice Sotomayor’s bizarre dissenting opinion in the recent Michigan affirmative action case, it seems she believes that government decisions made on the basis of race, something the Constitution expressly bars, are mandatory.
Someone has been emanating her penumbras because, to use the legal term of art, that’s Constitutional Crazy Talk.
Years ago, the liberals came up with the Political Process Doctrine. It’s the idea that if some small element of a state or local government – like a city council or a university board – is implementing policies liberals like, the people can’t use the ballot box to change things back.
It ought to be called the “Ratchet Doctrine.” You are free to make things more liberal to your bleeding heart’s content. You just can’t ever undo them. It’s right there in the Constitution. Somewhere. Maybe in the paragraph before the one that says you can have an abortion up until your fetus can drive.
Liberals like to call the Constitution a “living document.” Oh, how many activists in robes cite that mind-bogglingly misguided metaphor as they turn a foundational document into a kind of political Mad Lib where they scribble nonsense into blanks that don’t exist?
In fact, the Constitution is dead, dead as a doorknob. It has to be. Otherwise, it’s not a constitution.
The Constitution is designed not to change with the times, not to yield the ancient wisdom that flows through it to the faux-wisdom of the present. It is the foundation of our system, not something to be causally disregarded every time some politician who thinks he’s smarter than James Madison gets a bright idea.
It ensures a stable society where firm political principles keep political actors in check. This, in turn, creates legitimacy. We Americans take legitimacy for granted. Want to know what happens when you forsake legitimacy in favor of petty expedience? You end up like most of the rest of the world. Go ask a vet about how that works out – many of us have spent years in foreign lands full of mass graves cleaning up the bloody detritus of illegitimacy.
That a Supreme Court justice has such a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution’s purpose is alarming. She repeats the phrase “race matters” throughout her 58-page dissent, as if hackneyed clichés worthy of some third-tier MSNBC panelist constitute legal reasoning.
No, race doesn’t matter. That’s the point of our Constitution.
Sotomayor just didn’t like that the Constitution allows people to vote to undo liberal failures, so she simply invented a prohibition on doing so. Under her “constitution,” you are allowed to vote for any policy she and her liberal pals approve of. You can just never vote against one because…well, pretty much just because she says so.
To be charitable, it’s not a particularly coherent legal opinion. One can’t be sure Sotomayor was drinking when she wrote it, but one hopes she was because at least then she’d have an excuse.
Where liberals don’t totally ignore what the Constitution says, they add asterisks, each one qualifying and circumscribing a fundamental right. The right to freely exercise your religion? The right to speak freely? Those are totally, absolutely, completely inalienable!*
*That is, unless we liberals decide you shouldn’t exercise your religion or express yourself in the way you want.
You’ll hear a lot from liberal jurists and their quarter-wit cheerleaders in the pundit and social media worlds about how we have to interpret rights “reasonably.”
No, no, no, no, no.
That is utterly and completely wrong. The whole point of listing a right within our Constitution’s Bill of Rights is that it’s beyond discussion, meaning some bureaucrat cannot infringe upon it because his pea-brain has decided that it makes sense to do so. What’s a “reasonable” exercise of religion or “reasonable” speech? Constitutionally, the question makes no sense. Liberals hate that they can’t “reason” our rights down to a tiny nub that’s too small to interfere with their dreams of power and control.
Rights aren’t a favor the government extends to us in its wise benevolence. Our rights existed in us from the moment of our creation, and they are inalienable. The Bill of Rights is not there to list for us what rights we have been granted. It’s to provide the government with a partial list of our fundamental rights and to warn it to keep its grubby mitts off them.
The only thing worse than seeing things within the Constitution which aren’t there is refusing to see things that manifestly are. Only liberals can look at an amendment reading “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” and see blank parchment.
That windy hack John Paul Stevens is back, making the rounds proposing an awesome solution for the “problem” with the Second Amendment. The problem to liberals, of course, is that it ensures that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Stevens’ solution is to amend the Second Amendment to nullify it, and at least his current campaign seeks to change the Constitution the right way – by amendment. Of course, he’s only doing that because his reflexive liberal attempt to impose a “reasonability” test on this fundamental right, and thus transform it from a right into a privilege, failed.
The mainstream media loves the idea of a former Supreme Court justice railing against flyover state rubes presuming to exercise rights without the permission of their liberal urban betters. But having this elderly jurist on television, even while being tossed the softest of softballs, is doing him no favor. It’s painfully clear that Justice Stevens is utterly ignorant of the last two decades of detailed and careful legal scholarship on the Second Amendment’s origins and history. It’s frankly embarrassing to see him on a public platform when he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.
While we can forgive Stevens, we should not be so charitable about those still on the bench who either do not understand, or do not care about, our Constitution. Our Constitution, and the legitimacy it fosters, have created a uniquely just and stable society. Let’s not throw that away just to check off a few items from the progressive bucket list.
Here is a sample of constitutional amendments from nine Scotus blackrobes:
Helvering v. Davis. Congress can collect and distribute taxes to promote the general welfare. It opened the floodgates to income redistribution.
Wickard v. Filburn. Blew the commerce clause to pieces. Congress can regulated just about anything.
Whitman v. American Trucking Associations. Administrative agencies can pass regulations with the force of law.
Baker v. Carr. One man one vote democratized state legislatures in a fashion similar to the 17th Amendment.
There are probably dozens of other Scotus rulings that have effectively rewritten the constitution.
Yes I did, but the link in post#4 leads to your opinion to which you have a right of course
I’ve been meaning to praise you and your efforts for some time, now. I apologize for not doing so sooner. You’re doing great work and it is really critical work.
Hayek said this to Antony Fisher when Fisher told Hayek of his intent to run for politics and set Britain right:
Fisher: I share all your worries and concerns as expressed in The Road to Serfdom and I’m going to go into politics and put it all right.
Hayek: No you’re not! Society’s course will be changed only by a change in ideas. First you must reach the intellectuals, the teachers and writers, with reasoned argument. It will be their influence on society which will prevail, and the politicians will follow.
That’s a major part of what FR and people like you do. Talk radio is another outlet and now so are the various conservative blogs, twitter accts, Twitchy, etc. The Left understood this earlier than we did and took over the media and the schools. We can undo that, but we need to capture and shame the intellectuals with intelligent, well-reasoned argument.
We’ve crushed them on the 2nd Amendment such that you’ll not find a majority of legal scholars against our view of an individual right. They’re using a defensive withdrawal by simply working to limit that individual right, but nobody pretends that it isn’t an individual right. That victory alone, reopens the debate on the Bill of Rights and who or what is limited by it.
Brilliant job. Keep up the good works. You are making a difference. Don’t let the whiners slow you down. It’s easy to fret at your screen and hard to do something. You’re doing something and thank you!
She is the face of liberalism. I cannot think of the last conservative woman of her generation I’ve seen that looks like that.
Does anyone know of a conservative woman with that much inflammation?
How goes your efforts against nitwittery in Illinois?
Small progress. The nuttery is strong in this one. You might not believe it, but there are days, many days, I wish I lived in Michigan.
What we are reaching in this country is a banning of prejudicial views. To me not all prejudices are bad.
For example if I go out in my driveway and there is a dog there and he looks friendly I would go and pat him.
Because of my prejudice against coyotes, if I saw a coyote in my driveway I would not try to befriend it.
Now some would say that is not a good analogy because people are different than animals.
But my life experiences and documentation show to me some groups of people and neighborhoods are more dangerous to me than others. -Tom
<>there are days, many days, I wish I lived in Michigan.<>
Yikes!
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