Racialism can be easily overlooked if it is so commonplace. When it’s everywhere, it’s easy to become blasé about it. Yet, every now and then, we perk up when radicalism’s inanities poke through life’s hustle and bustle in the form of a Supreme Court justice like Sonia Sotomayor. Leaving aside the radicalism in her abortion views, her interrogations are absolutely nonsensical.
In her questioning of Scott Stewart, solicitor general of Mississippi defending the state’s law, she accused a possible majority of the justices of “politicizing” the Court if they should rule against her preferences. And I quote her highness:
“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? . . . . If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive? How will the Court survive?”
It’s all political? Of course, it is. I reference Plato, Aristotle, Cicero. Before progressives expanded the government beyond its competence and forever tarred the word, “politics” was understood to be a community’s activity to decide what to do on matters before it. It’s about decision-making. In our constitutional system, the judiciary participates in quintessential decision-making. Have you noticed? Has she?
Was it only “politics” when the Court dealt a death blow to Jim Crow with Brown v. Board of Education? Was the Court only politicking when it invented a federal constitutional right to end the life of a fetus (abortion), the crux of the matter in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization before her Court? Take any case that would fit into her sacred canon of cases. Was the Court politicking in all of them? The Court is doing today what they did back then: make decisions.
Her apparent operating principle is that if the Court majority goes against her, it’s “politics”.
She has no observable ability to distinguish between proper and improper legal reasoning. Furthermore, she implicitly reserves for the Court the power to be a permanent constitutional convention, forever making up rules and rights as fits the fancies of bullying crowds from the campus and gaggle of Democratic Party allies.
Check out this gem of an excuse for the Court to do whatever it wants:
“. . . there’s so much that’s not in the Constitution, including the fact that we have the last word. Marbury versus Madison. There is not anything in the Constitution that says that the Court, the Supreme Court, is the last word on what the Constitution means. It was totally novel at that time. And yet, what the Court did was reason from the structure of the Constitution that that’s what was intended.
“They have all [newly minted rights such as abortion, gay marriage, contraception, etc.], like Marbury versus Madison, been discerned from the structure of the Constitution.”
Is there anything that can’t be drawn from “the structure of the Constitution” in the mind of Sotomayor? What’s her limiting principle? The Casey case of the 1990’s supplanted Roe regarding abortion and hung the right on “liberty”. “Liberty” becomes the license to do anything. All she would need is access “penumbras and emanations” (words from Casey) to invent a new constitution. This isn’t the rule of law; it’s the rule of men/women/whatever.
Watch the hearings. They’re a hoot.
RogerG