By Kurt
Schlichter
Monday, April
28, 2014
Based upon Justice Sotomayor’s bizarre dissenting opinion
in the recent Michigan affirmative action case, it seems she believes that
government decisions made on the basis of race, something the Constitution
expressly bars, are mandatory.
Someone has been emanating her penumbras because, to use
the legal term of art, that’s Constitutional Crazy Talk.
Years ago, the liberals came up with the Political
Process Doctrine. It’s the idea that if some small element of a state or local
government – like a city council or a university board – is implementing
policies liberals like, the people can’t use the ballot box to change things
back.
It ought to be called the “Ratchet Doctrine.” You are
free to make things more liberal to your bleeding heart’s content. You just
can’t ever undo them. It’s right there in the Constitution. Somewhere. Maybe in
the paragraph before the one that says you can have an abortion up until your
fetus can drive.
Liberals like to call the Constitution a “living
document.” Oh, how many activists in robes cite that mind-bogglingly misguided
metaphor as they turn a foundational document into a kind of political Mad Lib
where they scribble nonsense into blanks that don’t exist?
In fact, the Constitution is dead, dead as a doorknob. It
has to be. Otherwise, it’s not a constitution.
The Constitution is designed not to change with the
times, not to yield the ancient wisdom that flows through it to the faux-wisdom
of the present. It is the foundation of our system, not something to be
causally disregarded every time some politician who thinks he’s smarter than
James Madison gets a bright idea.
It ensures a stable society where firm political
principles keep political actors in check. This, in turn, creates legitimacy.
We Americans take legitimacy for granted. Want to know what happens when you
forsake legitimacy in favor of petty expedience? You end up like most of the
rest of the world. Go ask a vet about how that works out – many of us have
spent years in foreign lands full of mass graves cleaning up the bloody
detritus of illegitimacy.
That a Supreme Court justice has such a fundamental
misunderstanding of the Constitution’s purpose is alarming. She repeats the
phrase “race matters” throughout her 58-page dissent, as if hackneyed clichés
worthy of some third-tier MSNBC panelist constitute legal reasoning.
No, race doesn’t matter. That’s the point of our
Constitution.
Sotomayor just didn’t like that the Constitution allows
people to vote to undo liberal failures, so she simply invented a prohibition
on doing so. Under her “constitution,” you are allowed to vote for any policy
she and her liberal pals approve of. You can just never vote against one
because…well, pretty much just because she says so.
To be charitable, it’s not a particularly coherent legal
opinion. One can’t be sure Sotomayor was drinking when she wrote it, but one
hopes she was because at least then she’d have an excuse.
Where liberals don’t totally ignore what the Constitution
says, they add asterisks, each one qualifying and circumscribing a fundamental
right. The right to freely exercise your religion? The right to speak freely?
Those are totally, absolutely, completely inalienable!*
*That is, unless we liberals decide you shouldn’t
exercise your religion or express yourself in the way you want.
You’ll hear a lot from liberal jurists and their
quarter-wit cheerleaders in the pundit and social media worlds about how we
have to interpret rights “reasonably.”
No, no, no, no, no.
That is utterly and completely wrong. The whole point of
listing a right within our Constitution’s Bill of Rights is that it’s beyond
discussion, meaning some bureaucrat cannot infringe upon it because his
pea-brain has decided that it makes sense to do so. What’s a “reasonable”
exercise of religion or “reasonable” speech? Constitutionally, the question
makes no sense. Liberals hate that they can’t “reason” our rights down to a
tiny nub that’s too small to interfere with their dreams of power and control.
Rights aren’t a favor the government extends to us in its
wise benevolence. Our rights existed in us from the moment of our creation, and
they are inalienable. The Bill of Rights is not there to list for us what
rights we have been granted. It’s to provide the government with a partial list
of our fundamental rights and to warn it to keep its grubby mitts off them.
The only thing worse than seeing things within the
Constitution which aren’t there is refusing to see things that manifestly are.
Only liberals can look at an amendment reading “the right of the people to keep
and bear arms shall not be infringed” and see blank parchment.
That windy hack John Paul Stevens is back, making the
rounds proposing an awesome solution for the “problem” with the Second Amendment.
The problem to liberals, of course, is that it ensures that the right of the
people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
Stevens’ solution is to amend the Second Amendment to
nullify it, and at least his current campaign seeks to change the Constitution
the right way – by amendment. Of course, he’s only doing that because his
reflexive liberal attempt to impose a “reasonability” test on this fundamental
right, and thus transform it from a right into a privilege, failed.
The mainstream media loves the idea of a former Supreme
Court justice railing against flyover state rubes presuming to exercise rights
without the permission of their liberal urban betters. But having this elderly
jurist on television, even while being tossed the softest of softballs, is
doing him no favor. It’s painfully clear that Justice Stevens is utterly
ignorant of the last two decades of detailed and careful legal scholarship on
the Second Amendment’s origins and history. It’s frankly embarrassing to see
him on a public platform when he clearly has no idea what he’s talking about.
While we can forgive Stevens, we should not be so
charitable about those still on the bench who either do not understand, or do
not care about, our Constitution. Our Constitution, and the legitimacy it
fosters, have created a uniquely just and stable society. Let’s not throw that
away just to check off a few items from the progressive bucket list.
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