I didn't. Divides were kept hidden. But no more.
With the liberal bloc narrowly losing a number of high-profile cases this term -- including late-term abortion, campaign finance reform, and public school desegregation -- the political and legal stakes produced sharper ideological lines.
Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer all wrote toughly worded dissents, punctuated by reading some of them from the bench. It is a rarely used privilege, reserved for only the biggest, most contentious cases.
"The one symbolic step that they can take to show they are almost outraged and that they think something terrible has happened is to read these dissents from the bench. And so the fact that the more liberal members of the court have done it is really a sign that they are frustrated."
I expect this from ordinary, garden-variety liberals, but I'd like to think that Supreme Court justices are at least a little above such plebeian acts. Apparently they're not.
Legal experts say the new conservative majority of the Roberts court will continue to produce divided rulings, and divisive rhetoric.
Why weren't legal scholars saying such things when liberals held sway in the court? Gawd, liberals think we're all entitled to their beliefs.
Update, 7/9/07: Here's someone else who thinks we're all entitled to the liberal view regarding court decisions.
4 comments:
If the justices of the Surpreme Court were making decisions based on sound interpretation of the law, then this would not be an issue, conservative or liberal. But because liberals have, for decades, seen the courts as a backdoor means of implementing their political agenda when the great unwashed won't accept it through the legislative process, we should expect nothing less from those liberals on the Court. That they are abandoning the Constitution and the rule of law to impose a political agenda seems to bother the liberal justices not at all. More's the pity.
You nailed, in just your first two sentences, it much more clearly than I did.
Legislating from the bench has become normal even though technically it's unconstitutional. Even in a legal election, such as that in Farmers Branch, when the results of the election-demanded by the plaintiffs-didn't go their way, they would simply file a lawsuit with a sympathetic judge. What sense does it make to even have an election if a minority group or political action group can simply force their views with a restraining order?
Makes perfect sense to me.
Liberals are the proper rulers of mankind. Just ask one of 'em. They're the rule-makers, not the rule-obeyers. Being bound by the law is for "the masses" not the law-makers. After all, those who give the law are clearly above the law. Just ask 'em. It holds true for liberal judges just as it does for liberal celebrities, politicians and liberals who are none of the above.
That's why when Justice William Douglas discovered the right to privacy in the emanation of a penumbra the lefties of the period, and since, were thrilled.
Not only was Roe v. Wade a policy victory without the tedium and uncertainty of the legislative process but it affirmed, from the highest court in the land, that law can be made by decree. If you're a law-giver which all lefties must be.
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