Free Republic

The great irony of America is that it has achieved so much public good by letting people simply tend to their private business. By contrast, the most disastrous social experiments of our age –Marxism and its less ambitious offspring-- have ruined so many private lives by holding the “public good” so high that no one life seemed to matter. But the public good is, in the end, nothing more than the sum of several million seemingly insignificant private lives. You cannot dispose of these individuals and their individual rights and somehow increase the public good. That is why last week’s...

If U.S. Chief Justice William Rehnquist soon retires because of health problems, as many court observers anticipate, expect President Bush to promote a judge off the court to the chief justice’s post. Promoting Associate Justice Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia to chief justice and nominating another candidate to fill the vacancy on the court would prompt two near-simultaneous confirmation battles in the Senate. Some conservative strategists think that would be too big a chore, especially in the shadow of the ultimate Senate showdown over judges, the bigger battle to replace a centrist such as Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. It’s a...

A Supreme Court with an absent and ailing chief justice is very different from a White House with an absent and ailing president. While the president embodies one entire branch of government, the chief justice merely heads another. In the two weeks that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, 80. has been treated for a serious form of thyroid cancer, life at the court has proceeded without a sense of crisis. The judicial function is shared by eight other people, with Justice John Paul Stevens, the senior associate justice, presiding over courtroom sessions and the justices' private conferences. The administrative tasks...

It's axiomatic that believing everything you hear on television is unwise. This outlook is especially useful today, because it's equally axiomatic among those who write and produce television news that today's Supreme Court has been hijacked by conservative ideologues, a claim supported by neither history nor common sense. Before the High Court handed down its decision in the landmark Michigan affirmative action case, the evening news anchors sounded this refrain over and over again. We will hear it once more before the decision in the Pledge of Allegiance case is announced. The assumption of Rehnquist Court conservatism also prefigures much...