Stare Indecisis
Having failed to lay a glove on
Samuel Alito this week on ethics, liberal opponents are now
falling back on a hardy perennial to justify their votes against
him: He lacks due regard for Supreme Court precedent, and in
particular he might vote to overturn that holiest of liberal
precedents, Roe v. Wade.
As long as they're raising the
subject, we agree this is a good moment to consider just what
everyone means by stare decisis (Latin for "to stand
by decided matters"). In the liberal caricature of the
phrase, it means there are two kinds of conservative Justices.
There are the "real conservatives" who never vote
to overturn liberal precedents. And there are the "radicals,"
such as Antonin Scalia, who are only too eager to overturn established
law. Liberal Democrats profess to be scared to death that Judge
Alito is the second sort.
But in the hearings this week,
Judge Alito was hard to pin down because the idea of Supreme
Court precedent is itself elastic. "The presumption is
that the Court will follow its prior precedents," he said
when Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter asked him about Roe.
"There needs to be a special justification for overruling
a prior precedent."
Sounds good, but following precedent
isn't a mindless, lemming-like matter. As Judge Alito noted,
some rulings deserved to be overturned, such as Plessy v.
Ferguson, which sanctioned the separate-but-equal doctrine
in 1896 and was superseded by Brown v. Board of Education
in 1954. Dred Scott was also deservedly overturned, though
it took a Civil War to do it.
Certainly, liberals don't mind
overturning precedents they don't like. In Lawrence v. Texas,
the 2003 ruling that banned state sodomy laws, a 6-3 Supreme
Court majority eagerly overturned Bowers v. Hardwick,
a 5-4 decision from 1986 that had declared such laws to be the
prerogative of the states.
And in Roper v. Simmons,
last year's decision banning the death penalty for juveniles,
the Court's liberal bloc (assisted by the protean Anthony Kennedy)
was only too happy to overturn Stanford v. Kentucky,
which was decided in 1989. In justifying this reversal, moreover,
the Court put less reliance on American case law than on foreign
legal precedent.
We were glad to see Judge Alito
distance himself from this growing à la carte judicial practice.
"I don't think that it's appropriate or useful to look
to foreign law in interpreting the provisions of our Constitution,"
he said in response to Senator Tom Coburn (R., Oklahoma)
"I think the Framers would be stunned by the idea that
the Bill of Rights is to be interpreted by taking a poll of
the countries of the world."
Opinion Journal
http://www.opinionjournal.com/weekend/hottopic/?id=110007817
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Critics vs. Christ
A debate in the mainstream press
has arisen over the Christian messages in Disney's new movie,
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
based on the popular books by C.S. Lewis, the acclaimed Christian
Oxford professor.
"The criticism has been unremitting
from the liberal elite. The books have been derided for their
positive depiction of Christian spirituality and Western virtues.
In the ... Los Angeles Times Book Review, Laura Miller
calls Lewis' insertion of Christian metaphors in his 'Narnia'
books 'a terrible betrayal.' ... Carina Chocano of the Los
Angeles Times made snide comments about the movie and the
book's Christian metaphors, calling it 'a medieval vision of
Christianity for another dark age.' ...
"It is the secularist contention
that Lewis' story would be stronger if he had only omitted the
spiritual references, which they argue are unnecessary to a
full appreciation of the pieces. What they fail to recognize
is that the spiritual elements are what give Narnia its
life and make Lewis' books, otherwise utterly unremarkable,
profoundly powerful and relevant."
Ted Baehr
World Net Daily
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48282
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Who Has an Agenda?
Samuel Alito felt he had to appease the liberal gods during
the early stages of his Senate Judiciary Committee hearings
by declaring he has "no agenda." Conservatives are
supposed to say such things, whether they mean it or not. Liberals
have an agenda: to change the culture of the nation by judicial
edicts.
Sen. Charles Schumer, New York Democrat, summarized the left's
agenda. Schumer declared that Alito has a "triple burden."
Not only is he replacing the swing vote of Justice Sandra Day
O'Connor, but he must also prove he is not the handmaiden of
the religious right, or that he would take extreme positions
on constitutional issues.
Nowhere in the Constitution is
there mention of a swing vote seat (or a minority or female
seat, either, as some liberals have suggested). Nowhere in the
Constitution is "extreme" defined. It could be argued
there have been many extreme positions taken by the court —
from Dred Scott v. Sandford (in which the court majority decided
that slaves could never be considered citizens of the United
States, to Roe v. Wade in which a majority claimed that a woman
had total autonomy over the life of her unborn child.)
If Schumer is concerned about
justices taking extreme positions, he should have voted against
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose writings and pronouncements
revealed her belief, while an ACLU lawyer, in legalizing human
relationships beyond male-female marriage and secularizing the
public square. To a liberal such a position is mainstream.
Cal Thomas
Jewish World Review
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas011206.asp
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Destined for the Supper Dish
The human race's prospects
of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless
against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless
against ourselves. — Arnold Toynbee
The eminent British historian Arnold
Toynbee didn't live long enough to see it, but he might have
been talking about the peculiar sense of helplessness of the
Western world, circa 2000. We easily subdue tigers, but we cannot
control our own impulse for weakness in the face of challenge
by a determined hunter. We've surrendered to the temptation
to believe the tiger has no teeth, and besides, we can tame
a predator by merely making nice.
Since it's not nice to think ill of others, even of the others
who yearn to behead us, we become increasingly defenseless against
enemies determined to destroy our civilization. The yearning
to be regarded as nice is surely the point of the growing opposition
to the war in Iraq, which is morphing into opposition to doing
anything about terrorists, those abroad and those among us.
If we think nice thoughts, maybe they will go away.
We "make nice" when we
make excuses for the tiger's violent behavior, seduced by the
idea that we should correct the "root causes" of his
search for dinner at our expense. We think we can change the
nature of the enemy if only we understand what makes the enemy
violent, foolishly imagining that we can repeal the law of the
jungle with our own good intentions. We can afford to make nice
once we get the tiger in a cage, but in the wild he's a predator,
and we have to be aware that he's stalking us.
Suzanne Fields
Townhall
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/suzannefields/
2006/01/16/182460.html
