Over the last couple of weeks, my uncle Harry has been providing me with pointers to articles written from a more pro-republican point of view. They have a much more right wing viewpoint than I am comfortable with, however, one thing is quite clear: the Democrats’ campaign was incoherent. From what I can tell Kerry didn’t seem to be focussed on anything other than “Bush is Bad for America”. Clearly this is not a winning strategy and I wouldn’t want a party to win in the UK on that sort of platform.
Related to this is the role of Judges in the US. They have power. They have lots of power. They are so powerful that they decided the result of the 2000 Presidential Election. Harry sent me an article about Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Bear in mind, that I’ve never heard of this guy before…
It doesn’t start well:
“While Scalia is viewed by many liberals as a right-wing ideologue bent on overturning Roe v. Wade and other progressive decisions they favor, he enjoys a far more exalted status among a growing cadre of conservative law students, lawyers, professors, and judges. They see him as an intrepid legal warrior seeking to put rules back into the rule of law.”
Reading this, I don’t think that judges should have “exalted” status with wing… so I’m suspicious.. “intrepid legal warrior” doesn’t make me any more comfortable with Scalia.
The next bit however is sane:
His is an approach to law that seeks to limit the ability of judges to use judicial power to impose their own value judgments and policy preferences on the nation.
This is more like it. As Harry commented in his email, Judges are there to enforce the law, not make it. Or to put it another way, the elected representatives of the people make the law and the judiciary ensures that it is applied fairly. There’s a lot more rhetoric in the article and it’s worth the read, but I came away thinking that this Judge was sane.
Not content though as clearly this is a conservative judge talking to a conservative audience reported by a conservative paper, I did a small bit of research. The Supreme Court Historical Society appears reasonably impartial, and I found this quote from Scalia’s interview for a position on the Supreme Court:
Scalia said that he considered the most important part of the Constitution to be the system of “checks and balances among the three branches….so that no one of them is able to ‘run roughshod’ over the liberties of the people.”
Again, quite reasonable and what I would expect a Judge to be doing. Actually, just read the article as it’ll save me quoting it all :) Again, seems sane.
How about another essay written by Scalia about the death penalty:
the Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living but dead?or, as I prefer to put it, enduring. It means today not what current society (much less the Court) thinks it ought to mean, but what it meant when it was adopted. For me, therefore, the constitutionality of the death penalty is not a difficult, soul?wrenching question. It was clearly permitted when the Eighth Amendment was adopted (not merely for murder, by the way, but for all felonies?including, for example, horse?thieving, as anyone can verify by watching a western movie). And so it is clearly permitted today.
and then the important bit:
but the instrument of evolution ([…]) is not the nine lawyers who sit on the Supreme Court of the United States, but the Congress of the United States and the legislatures of the fifty states, who may, within their own jurisdictions, restrict or abolish the death penalty as they wish.
To my mind, this is the sort of Supreme Judge that is beneficial to the American people: he understands that his job is to rule on the application of the law and not to make the law.
I have to conclude is that if Bush follows through on his promise to appoint Supreme Court Justices in the mould of Scalia, then American democracy in the long term will be better off. It does raise the abortion question though but I don’t know anything about Roe vs Wade or how the abortion law works in the US at all. However, it’s quite clear that if abortion is legal in the US it should be legal because of laws created by the US government and not by decisions made by the Judges.