The air at the Sotomayor confirmation hearings was so thick with the vapors of Hanta virus today, it's hard to know where to begin dissecting all the insane departures from legal logic that filled the airwaves every ten minutes or so, but this passage from the esteemed junior Senator from Secession Land Texas's opening statement will suffice:
Over time . . . the Supreme Court has often veered off the course established by the Framers. First, the Supreme Court has invented new rights not clearly rooted in any constitutional text. For example, the Supreme Court has micromanaged the death penalty, creating new rights spun from whole cloth. It has announced constitutional rules governing everything from punitive damages to sexual activity. It has relied on international law that the People never adopted.The Supreme Court has even taken on the job of defining the rules for the game of golf. (If you're curious, the case is PGA Tour v. Martin from 2001). Some people call this "judicial activism." Whatever you call it, it's pretty far from enforcing the written Constitution that the Framers proposed and the people enacted.
Let's get this straight. In John Cornyn's learned opinion, Casey Martin had no right to insist that the PGA revise its tour eligibility rules under the Americans With Disabilities Act because no federal court should have the power to "define the rules" of the game to conform to an act of Congress. Okay, if that's the case, then Frank Ricci similarly had no right to insist that the City of New Haven revise its hiring practices under ADA for the same legal reason.
In which case, Frank Ricci is never hired by the City of New Haven as a firefighter, so there is no lawsuit against the city a decade later over promotions testing, and no appeals court decisions to render, and no phony controversy to be employed in televised hearings to badger Sonia Sotomayor and that scary Muslim socialist who wants to appoint her to the Supreme Court.
In retrospect, maybe PGA v. Martin was not the wisest analogy to infer, no?
Someone should remind John Cornyn that "the written Constitution that the framers proposed" prohibited people like Sonia Sotomayor from voting in federal elections, and consigned people like Barack Obama to legally sanctioned chattel status. If he honestly believes that document, as it was ratified in 1791, still serves as the only relevant legal benchmark in deciding court confirmation cases, he isn't qualified to be an elected public official in any capacity.
Of course, we know the answer to that. He doesn't believe anything of the sort. He has no firm judicial beliefs or political convictions at all. He is a Gingrich-era Republican. The only thing he and his comrades gave a rat's ass about is the hoarding and consolidation of raw political power, and savaging the opposition in the process. He is also, as are most of his cynical and apathetic colleagues, deeply and profoundly stupid. It goes with the territory when you don't give a shit about policy.
---Vitelius
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