The recent panic amongst liberals regarding the Supreme Court vacancy is amusing in that it is entirely of their own making.
The hard Left has, since the 1960’s (and really before), embraced a judicial philosophy which is not essential to their position. According to this philosophy, the United States Constitution (and written law in general) does not need to be interpreted as written, but has a meaning which “evolves” over time. Thus, rather than amend the Constitution when it is in need of updating, the liberals have decided it is better to simply have a judge or justice declare that the law has evolved, and read into it a meaning that it never had before.
Conservatives are, of course, susceptible to this sort of forced interpretation because, of course, it is outcome-based. In other words, rather than attempting to determine what the law as written means, and apply it to a given situation, this philosophy works by looking at the outcome desired and then twisting law and precedent to fit this desire. The classic example is abortion. There is no way, at all, that the founders and authors of the Constitution conceived of abortion of a constitutional right, yet Justice Blackmun felt comfortable in writing a decision giving us a right which doesn’t exist. (While depriving the unborn of what actually is a constitutional right, the right to life.) As I said, conservatives are quite capable of such faulty reasoning and have been guilty of it on occasion, but they have not adopted it as a judicial philosophy.
The Left decided to adopt this philosophy for a simple reason: their radical agenda could never be imposed by a vote of the people. However, an unelected panel of nine judges, all of whom attended elite law schools, could be easily convinced to override the Constitution and the will of the people to achieve the desired outcome.
I’ve often pointed out to liberals how short-sighted this philosophy is. After all, if judges are unconstrained by written law, then they are unconstrained by anything other than their own imaginations. Hence Griswold v. Connecticut, the decision which gave us a right to “privacy”. What’s wrong with a right to privacy? Well, it exists nowhere in the constitution, but Justice Douglas decided it exists in the “penumbras and emanations” of the Bill of Rights. In other words, the right doesn’t exist anywhere but the Constitution simply emanates it.
But wait, isn’t a right to privacy a good thing? I would say no, but here is a point I make even to people who support the murder of children also known as abortion: even if you think abortion is a great thing, you should oppose Roe v. Wade because the reasoning is faulty, and because there simply is no constitutional right to abortion. If a judge can just impose legal fictions into the written law because the thinks the law “emanates” this thing or that thing, that judge can just as easily take away what you’ve been given. Why couldn’t a judge write out of existence the first amendment, or the fourth (which protects against illegal search and seizure)?
Someone once told me “I just care about the result. You just care about the process.” Of course. Democracy is a process. The difference between freedom and tyranny is the process.
And so now the chickens have come home to roost. A Supreme Court vacancy should not be so big a deal as it is becoming. It shouldn’t matter much at all. And yet the left is terrified because a lifetime-appointed conservative majority could undo all their hard work of years. The short-sightedness of their philosophy is now apparent.
This blogger is not particularly a fan of American democracy, which has dethroned Christ from his social kingship. But I also realize we don’t live in a Catholic country, and as such, we need to be governed by laws and not men. We need to follow the established processes and not fabricate law at the stroke of a pen. Most of the country, corrupted by the schools and entertainment media, would probably vote for abortion and sodomitical marriage anyways. Here’s to hoping Trump’s appointment forces the situation, by overturning Roe, Griswold, Obergfell, and many others.
Mors Sanctorum 