Liberals Want Ideological Quotas On Supreme Court

OUR BELOVED American liberals are nothing if not transparent. After introducing us to the joys of racial quotas at the university and gender quotas in the firehouse now they want to impose ideological quotas on the United States Supreme Court.

But thanks to the piercing insights of postmodernism—another priceless gift to the world from liberals—we can understand what they are about. They want to preserve their power.

Liberals understand that the best they can hope for is to keep the ideological balance in the Court as it stands today, to elevate retiring Justice Sandra Day O´Connor to the status of a true conservative in the mold of Edmund Burke and to create a conventional wisdom that a sharp shift to the right on the Court would be a betrayal of Burke´s sacred memory. Thus E.J. Dionne rhapsodises about O´Connor.

She likes narrow rather than broad rulings, and dislikes abstract theories. She goes one case at a time. She´s interested in particular facts, in particular cases.

Liberals who once exulted in the sweep of cosmic principle now appreciate O´Connor´s feminine interest in the close-at-hand “and her constant wrestling with small things.” They see her as a bulwark against a revanchist conservative court that

will roll back the ability of elected officials to legislate in areas such as affirmative action, environmental regulation, campaign finance, and disability and labor rights.

It´s always comforting to read liberals misunderstanding what conservatives are about. What conservatives are about in the question of the Supreme Court is not the ability of elected officials to legislate. Conservatives understand that liberal elected officials live to enact comprehensive and mandatory federal programs on everything except the behavior of liberals in the bedroom. They understand and accept that. What conservatives want to roll back is the ability of unelected judges to legislate from the bench.

In the last generation the courts have arrogated to themselves the right to legislate for the legislative branch and administrate for the executive branch. They operate on the same basis as Justice O´Connor. Her “one clear judicial principle was that Sandra Day O´Connor should get to decide all the important questions before the country.” Conservatives think that this is wrong. It is wrong in the first place because the whole point of a limited government with separation of powers is that the legislative branch legislates, the executive branch administers, and the judicial branch judges—and not the other way around. It is wrong also for a practical reason. When judges get things wrong, when they arbitrarily take abortion out of the legislative arena thereby preventing an orderly compromise between the warring parties, or when they decide to administer school districts and then screw them up worse that the already screwed-up elected officials, what can the people do to redress their grievances?

Liberals fail to understand that their activist jurisprudence in the past half century has done enormous harm to the nation and to the edifice of law and justice itself. We can allow that their activism issued from a natural human impatience to sweep away the accumulation of oppression and injustice, especially the shameful precipitate of Negro slavery. But in this hankering for justice liberal judges succumbed again and again to the temptation to put a thumb upon the scales of justice, to make sure that it came out with the right result. It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder, and liberals have only just begun to pay for their world-historical mistake.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.