The payoff conclusion:
If [Representative] Frank succeeds in getting people to believe that judicial opinions are the kind wishes of good hearts, we will rubber-stamp these seemingly good people.And, then we will no longer have our representative democracy, but a nation governed by an oligarchy, granted one our Senators have approved. We will be like what the EU is becoming. Or, God forbid, protected by a flexible judiciary such as existed in Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Beware.
If we do that, we will have forgotten what law is, and our rights will depend on the continued beneficence of the judges we've empowered.
Regards — Cliff
PS: Here is Representative Frank's defense of his condemnation of Justice Scalia, on The Huffington Post.
Isn't anyone concerned that Dr. Kutner committed suicide?
ReplyDeleteIn recent interview with Hoover Institution, elaborating on his earlier statement that “devotees of The Living Constitution do not seek to facilitate social change but to prevent it” (Scalia & Gutmann, 1998), Justice Scalia said:
ReplyDelete"To make things change you don’t need a constitution. The function of a Constitution is to rigidify, to ossify, NOT to facilitate change. You want change? All you need is a legislature and a ballot box. Things will change as fast as you like. My Constitution, very flexible changing. You want right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens that it is a good idea, and pass a law. And then you find out, the results are worst than we ever thought, you can repeal the law. That’s flexibility. The reason people want the Supreme Court to declare that abortion is a constitutional right is precisely to rigidify that right, it means it sweeps across all fifty states and it is a law now and forever or until the Supreme Court changes its mind. That’s not flexibility."
"By trying to make the Constitution do everything that needs doing from age to age, we shall have caused it to do nothing at all." (Scalia & Gutmann, 1998)
Source(s):
Scalia, A., & Gutmann, A. (1998). A Matter of Interpretation: Federal Courts and the Law. Princeton University Press.
I liked Saqib Ali's comment. Thank you Saqib Ali.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I am concerned about the other comment from California. I missed the suicide of Dr Kutner. The truth is that I fell out of sequence and became distraught and stopped watching, hoping to catch up in a marathon DVD effort, rather than not understand what was going on due to the lost episodes. However, when I went to Barnes and Noble, they didn't have the newer episodes. Now I am concerned. Amazon?
Regards — Cliff