Tag Archives: Legislating from the Bench

Videos

Jennifer Roback Morse and Michele Bachmann respond to Prop 8 decision

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Here’s Dr. J of the Ruth Institute, first.

The music is a bit loud, but isn’t it fun to SEE her talking? Indeed!

(Her hair looks fine – I don’t see why she thinks that anyone would say anything bad about it)

And here’s Michele Bachmann.

Press release:

District Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision last week to overturn a California ballot initiative that prohibited same-sex marriage was an example of “judicial activism at its worse,” according to Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas).

Smith and fellow House Republicans Steve King (Iowa) and Michele Bachmann (Minn.) introduced a resolution this morning disapproving of Vaughn’s ruling. The resolution, according to Smith, has 15 co-sponsors in the House. However, it is uncertain whether it will attract the support of Republican leadership in the lower chamber.

In his decision, Walker ruled that moral objection to gay marriage on the part of California voters was not a rational enough reason to uphold Proposition 8. In addition, Walker wrote that the measure violated Equal Protection laws for homosexuals.

The trio of highly conservative lawmakers insisted today that their opposition to the ruling does not stem from the fact that it benefits the gay community, but rather that it highlights a growing trend of activism from behind the bench. Bachmann said she found the ruling “infuriating.”

“Are we now in the position of giving the judge the decision to decide whether or not the American people are rational when they go to the voting booth and make their wishes known?” she asked. “It certainly seems the answer would be in the negative.”

Too bad the video gets cut off at the very end – I think she was going to say Supreme COURT. I’ll bet you all thought she was just a fiscal conservative, right? But no – she’s really thought things through – and that’s why we like her! Because she’s perfect!

News

Are liberal lawyers and law professors in favor of open debate?

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Here’s a great post over at Stuart Schneiderman’s blog.

The topic of the post is a high-profile meeting  of lawyers and law professors at NYU Law School to discuss the recent Supreme Court decision that allow businesses to make political donations to candidates in the same way that trial lawyer organizations and teacher unions and abortion providers do. The meeting was supposed to be an open and honest debate on the issues. Was it?

Excerpt:

The most disturbing aspect of the meeting was that everyone took for granted that the the decision had been wrongly decided. There was no free trade in ideas about the correctness or incorrectness of the decision; only a discussion about how to overturn the decision.

In their modus operandi the assembled lawyers were ignoring the marketplace of ideas in favor of their own dogmatic beliefs. These defenders of the marketplace of ideas were constitutionally incapable of finding any merit whatever in an opposing viewpoint.

If you refuse to allow an idea (whether a policy or a belief) to be tested against reality, then the question becomes who has the strongest faith. True believers are willing to fight and die to prove that their strength is strongest, thus, most true.

[…]Why were the assembled liberal lawyers so lathered up about the Citizens United decision. Simply, because they believed, dogmatically and unthinkingly, that corporate money was fundamentally corrupt and corrupting. Corporations were sinners; they had acquired their money by less than idealist means; they had no right to try to influence the democratic political process.

Again, dogmatic belief leads to a fighting faith. Why? Perhaps they wanted to maintain their own monopoly control of correct opinion. The greatest enemy of free trade in ideas today is the monopoly on dogmatic belief that is maintained by the educational and media establishments.

Surely, opposing views are aired, through conservative talk radio and through Fox News. But these engines of the free market in ideas are often subject to attack. Those who prefer a more mercantilist, monopoly control over the marketplace in ideas, want to invoke the fairness doctrine to shut down much of conservative talk radio. They often try to discredit Fox News for trafficking in hate speech.

As several of the commenters on the Times site pointed out, none of these great legal minds seem to have the least problem with the influence that labor unions exert on elections through their political advertising. At a time when the political power of labor unions has brought states, cities, and counties to the brink of bankruptcy… lawyers are about to go to war to stop corporations from spending money on political advertising.

This post highlights a change in my own views. I once wanted to be a lawyer, you see. And my judicial philosophy was one of idealism and judicial activism. But after reading Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions” three times, I am now a strict constructionist, while respecting rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Legislating from the bench now seems to me to be the wrong point of view. Injustices need to be fixed by legislators elected by the people, not by an appointed oligarchy of out-of-touch judges. So don’t ever say that I don’t change my mind when confronted with the evidence! It happens all the time. Well, sometimes.