Judicial Jousting

My July 14th post included some kvetching about how liberals are not fit to be judges, particularly when it comes to the Supreme Court. Victor Davis Hanson's article yesterday in National Review is about the same topic, and contains this gem of a quote that I have to share: "For liberals, precedent means little if it was not liberal, but everything if it was."

This kind of reminds me of Dianne Feinstein's asinine proclamation last March that Roe v. Wade is "super precedent" (although at least her phrasing wasn't as cartoonish as Arlen Specter's in 2005, when he referred to Roe as one of several "super-duper precedents").

I hate to beat an imaginary horse, but since liberals insist on believing in them where courts are concerned, I feel I must: There is no such thing as either a "super precedent" or "super-duper precedent," there are only precedents. And yes they can be wrong, which means they are not holy sacraments. And when they are wrong, they should be overturned when the opportunity arises.

If not for the ability to overturn precedents, racial segregation in public facilities would still be legal, and the congressional representation of states with high black populations would be diluted because the U.S. census would still be counting each black person as only three-fifths of an individual.

When someone says you must respect Roe because it's precedent, ask if he or she will respect Citizens United v. FEC and District of Columbia v. Heller, since they too are precedent. I guarantee you they will say no, and I suspect they will say no with hostility, never mind that those precedents are landmark decisions that protect the First and Second Amendments respectively.

To wit: When liberals start preening about the sanctity of judicial precedent, they deserve to be ignored. And even mocked. Sure they have a right to state their opinions, but they do not have a right to be granted some kind of implicit seal of intellectual equivalency by everyone they flap their lips at.

If they claim they deserve such a right, you might want to ask why they believe that right is more worthy of protection than the right of a full-term baby to not be slaughtered in the womb at the behest of his or her mother. You might also want to ask why they believe their own right to "be heard" is worth more than the right of that baby's father to keep his baby from being killed.

Just don't expect a fair, logical, or constructive response. Because I am so learned watched Legally Blonde, I know that Aristotle said the law is "reason free from passion." But because I pay attention to the world, I know that for left-wingers the law is "whatever their passion of the moment happens to be, free from reason."

Will reason alone defeat passion alone when the two sides try to sway the undecided in the public square? I don't think so. We non-leftists have liberals beat in the battle of reason, but we will lose the overall war if we do not at least tie them in the battle of passion. So as the brouhaha over Kavanagh's nomination approaches, we need not neuter ourselves by giving respect that is not deserved... especially to those who treat us with contempt and whose very goal is to do away with individual rights.

That sounds bad. But it's true, no matter how much I wish it was not.