By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
It is probably a waste to even bother trying to address
this, but I’ll take this one for the team.
Amy Coney Barrett says that the role of the judge is to
interpret the Constitution as it actually is written, with special attention
given to the meaning of the words as understood at the time of their writing.
Joy Reid responds with what she apparently imagines to be a devastating reply:
“At the time the Constitution was ratified, Black people were classed as 3/5 of
a person.”
This is true. And so we . . . amended the Constitution.
The amendments were voted on in Congress, ratified by the
states, etc., and laws were passed acting on those amendments. That is how
amending the Constitution works.
It does not work by having freelance moralists on the
Supreme Court impose their personal views of justice on the law — even when
they are right.
The reason for that is that giving five unaccountable
lawyers the power to rewrite the basic law on a whim creates the power to do
great evil along with the power to do good.
The same model of judicial super-legislation that
produced the so-called constitutional right to abortion also blessed
Roosevelt’s concentration camps (Korematsu), Wilson’s war on political
dissent (Schenck), eugenic sterilization (Buck), and, famously,
the dehumanization of African Americans (Dred Scott). “We want to give quasi-dictatorial powers to the
Supreme Court, but only if they do nice things with it!” is not an
argument for adults. It is an invitation to chaos, as our own Supreme Court has
demonstrated on many occasions.
Surely it is better to have the 13th Amendment — and the
First, and the Second — than to rely on the good will and enlightenment of a
temporary majority of nine lawyers appointed by such presidents as we elect
through the goat-rodeo of American democracy. That is why we write the
important things down, and make the most important of them difficult to change.
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