McCain's Judicial Hypocrisy
This week John McCain wholeheartedly embraced the idea of "judicial activism" -- a throughly mendacious concept that actually just means opposing judicial decisions that conservatives disagree with.
Paul Waldman
The American Prospect
May 13, 2008
Both conservatives and progressives have the words and phrases they like to invoke, the commonly offered arguments, the villains and heroes who populate their rhetoric. But you could sift through every word of contemporary American political debate -- read every stump speech, pore over every press release, endure every moment of every cable chatfest -- and you would be unlikely to encounter a more complete, unadulterated, shameless piece of outright bullshit than "judicial activism." It is the ne plus ultra of disingenuousness, the zenith of cant, political deceit in its purest form. And seeing John McCain embrace it should disabuse anyone of the notion that he is somehow more honest than the typical politician.
And embrace it he did, in a speech last week that got lost behind the noise of the Democratic nomination fight. Warning of the danger from "activist judges," McCain railed against the threat from "the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power." Thus did McCain check one more box on his to-do list of pandering to the right-wing base.
The truth is that an "activist judge" is a judge who makes a decision conservatives don't like. If they truly cared about the principle that judges shouldn't substitute their own opinions for the law, then they would be just as exorcised about "activist" decisions that served conservative goals as they are about those that serve progressive goals. But if anyone can name me a single judicial decision that served the right's ends and that conservatives protested on the grounds that it was too "activist," I'll eat my hat. And even a court's refusal to exercise power and overrule laws or precedents -- as courts at every level did in the Terri Schaivo case -- will be called "activist" if conservatives don't like the outcome.
(Continued here.)
Paul Waldman
The American Prospect
May 13, 2008
Both conservatives and progressives have the words and phrases they like to invoke, the commonly offered arguments, the villains and heroes who populate their rhetoric. But you could sift through every word of contemporary American political debate -- read every stump speech, pore over every press release, endure every moment of every cable chatfest -- and you would be unlikely to encounter a more complete, unadulterated, shameless piece of outright bullshit than "judicial activism." It is the ne plus ultra of disingenuousness, the zenith of cant, political deceit in its purest form. And seeing John McCain embrace it should disabuse anyone of the notion that he is somehow more honest than the typical politician.
And embrace it he did, in a speech last week that got lost behind the noise of the Democratic nomination fight. Warning of the danger from "activist judges," McCain railed against the threat from "the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power." Thus did McCain check one more box on his to-do list of pandering to the right-wing base.
The truth is that an "activist judge" is a judge who makes a decision conservatives don't like. If they truly cared about the principle that judges shouldn't substitute their own opinions for the law, then they would be just as exorcised about "activist" decisions that served conservative goals as they are about those that serve progressive goals. But if anyone can name me a single judicial decision that served the right's ends and that conservatives protested on the grounds that it was too "activist," I'll eat my hat. And even a court's refusal to exercise power and overrule laws or precedents -- as courts at every level did in the Terri Schaivo case -- will be called "activist" if conservatives don't like the outcome.
(Continued here.)
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