What Should The Supreme Court Look Like?

November 4, 2005

 

So, Harriet Miers didn't quite work out. No small wonder. Nobody really knew much about her. We were asked by the president to back his Supreme Court pick on a leap of faith. Few were willing to jump that far.

 

Now we have Judge Samuel Alito, a man with impeccable credentials. Is he too conservative? Well, that depends on your definition of ‘conservative.' He seems to be one who would follow the Constitution, if that's what's meant by ‘conservative.' ‘Judicial activist' is what some are calling him. That's a term coined by the right to describe justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A judicial activist is someone who stretches his/her role as an adjudicator in order to further a political belief. In the case of the Supreme Court, a judicial activist who can't further his/her political agenda within the confines of the Constitution looks to extra-constitutional decisions to confirm their warped views. Ginsburg has made no bones about looking to World Court decisions when the Constitution does not fit her agenda. That is a judicial activist. That is also clearly not the role of the Supreme Court.

 

Early criticism of Alito was measured while the opposition decided on a plan of attack. We got a glimpse of the long knives waiting to be drawn when some media outlets pulled back their capes ever so slightly just after the Alito announcement. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel whined that Alito's selection would not be in keeping with “a court that looks like America.” Is that what we really want? A Supreme Court that looks like America?

 

What does your average American look like? For starters, your average American did not graduate from Yale Law School. Your average American never served on a court nor was ever a solicitor general. The average American knows precious little about our Constitution. In short, your average American, yours truly included, is infinitely unqualified to serve on the United States Supreme Court.

 

I grow weary of this ‘let's look like America' hogwash.

 

Here's what I want in a Supreme Court justice. I want someone who knows the United States Constitution inside and out. I want a justice who, if they don't completely understand the Constitution, will research what the architects of that document had to say about it. I don't want a judicial activist. I want a Constitutional activist.

 

Judicial activists try to confuse the public with catchy phrases like ‘separation of church and state' and other such notions that are not found in the Constitution. Look, the Constitution isn't written in some Bible code. It's in plain English. For instance, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” You can't get any clearer than that but people have been arguing for years that the constitutional right to bear arms doesn't apply to individual citizens.

 

A recent decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals stated that parents had no right to keep a school from giving their first-graders a sex survey. One of the questions was, “How often do you think about sex?” This for first-graders! In ruling against the aggrieved parents, the court stated, “ no such specific right can be found in the deep roots of the nation's history and tradition or implied in the concept of ordered liberty.” If parental rights aren't part of our history, what is?