Did you ever think you'd see the day that that Jesse Jackson, Lanny Davis, and Ralph Nader were on the side of life, while Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist were against it?
Well - yes, we do. We need more jurists like Scalia and Thomas.
If a law is wrong, if it is no longer what society wants or agrees with, if a right is desired yet absent, then it is the job of congress to rescind the unjust law, to write a new law, to pass a Constitutional amendment. It is NOT the job of the courts to bend the Constitution, to hallucinate new rights into the document where they never existed previously. The job of a Justice is to determine what is LEGAL, not what is MORAL. I mortally reject the notion - advocated by Living Constitutionalists like Steven Breyer, and now evidently Tom DeLay - the Supreme Court should be allowed to be granted the role of the nation's moral arbiter.
Let me discuss this in the light of an important recent case, in which the majority of the Supreme Court once again showed its utter contempt for legitimate Constitutional jurisprudence.
Executing a minor is a travesty of justice, it is - in virtually every way and instance whicih I can imagine - utterly immoral, and it should be illegal, in my opinion. And no matter what I think, or what Justice Kennedy thought in writing
Roper v. Simmons - easily the worst judgement offered by the court in recent memory - it is NOT unconstitutional. If I believe that executing a minor is a travesty of justice, I should lobby Congress to pass a law. THAT is how these matters should be decided: by the legislature.
And yet, now, some Conservatives - Conservatives who just last month argued loudly against the flagrant judicial activism of
Roper, something which I joined them in, argue that the Judges involved in the various procedings of
Ex parte T. Schaivo v. M. Schaivo should have made a determination of what was MORAL not what was LEGAL.
I like Pat Buchanan a lot, I subscribe to his magazine, I think he's made some very insightfull comments over the years, I think he's been a truly brave man to say some of the things he's said - but I think his argument quoted above is utterly assinine. I join with Pat in deploring that it came to this, and in concluding that this was an example of bad, unjust and immoral law - but the palliative for bad law is legislative action, not judicial activism.
