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Kathryn Jean Lopez
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August 27, 2008 11:30 A.M.
Wrestling over Judges
Can you smell what the Democrats are cookin’?
Denver — Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson may be called on to play John Roberts in Bush’s Court: The Movie. That’s the impression I got, anyhow, when Hillary Clinton referred to the nation’s highest Court as being in “a right-wing headlock” on Tuesday night, during her long-awaited speech to the Democratic convention here.
Only a left-wing ideologue would thus describe a Court that recently extended, for the first time in our history, habeas-corpus rights to enemy combatants held on foreign soil. Only a left-wing ideologue, one who is content with a judiciary going out of its bounds to write laws instead of simply interpreting the Constitution, could thus describe a Court where Anthony M. Kennedy — the toast of Salzburg — is the fulcrum.
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It’s a laughable contention. As further proof: The Court — Justices Kennedy, Breyer, Ginsburg, Souter, and Stevens, specifically — recently decided to protect the rights of child rapists, taking off the table the possibility of capital punishment in such cases. Demonstrating a profound incoherence in his thinking about the judiciary, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama, while embracing the liberal activists on the Court, recently expressed his disapproval of the politically untenable position of the Court in Kennedy v. Louisiana. And yet, these are the very types of justices you would appoint, Senator? The ones responsible for that shameful ruling? Who would let their personal objections to capital punishment cloud their thinking about what’s constitutionally acceptable?
Obama also told a Planned Parenthood conference last year that the conservatives on the Supreme Court lack “empathy.” Criticizing Justice Anthony Kennedy, in the Gonzales v. Carhart partial-birth abortion decision, which he described as part of a “a concerted effort to steadily roll back” access to abortions, Sen. Obama said, “Justice Kennedy knows many things, but my understanding is that he does not know how to be a doctor.” That’s an odd and unconstitutional standard for a judge. But, then, Democrats today tend to have odd and unconstitutional standards for the judiciary.
In Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito, President Bush has put two serious constitutional lawyers on the Court. John McCain has promised to emulate those picks — and this is what infuriates liberal activists like Clinton. They want judges who will remake our society, installing by judicial fiat the liberal policies that Democrats have been unable to secure through the ballot box.
As Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center puts it: “What Clinton really opposes is the prospect of a Court that abandons the stranglehold of liberal judicial activism and that gives free play to the broad rights of American citizens to make policy decisions through their legislators.”
Republican nominee John McCain is worried about the state of the courts, too. He has emphasized that the proper role of the judiciary is “one of the defining issues of this presidential election.”
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