Scrapbook
Scrapbook Can Sean Wilentz Read? When last the nation heard from Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, in November 2000, he was organizing a full-page New York Times advertorial in which...
...There it was on the Times op-ed page July 8: "From Justice Scalia, a Chilling Vision of Religion's Authority in America," Wilentz's take on Scalia's speech to a death penalty symposium at the University of Chicago divinity school in February (subsequently reprinted in the May issue of First Things...
...and (3) embraces a belief in the divine roots of democratic political authority that "has had no appreciable place in our constitutional history because the framers rejected it"—which would certainly be news to Thomas Jefferson, who imagined, we seem to recall, that all men had been "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...
...According to Wilentz, Scalia's Chicago speech: (1) promotes a conception of "Catholicism as Papist mind control...
...Precisely because democratic government does proceed from assumed divine authority, he argues, its laws may be disputed and amended, but must always be respected...
...Last Friday, the report— described by the AP as a “sobering new assessment”—was finally delivered to Congress...
...Back in April, another judge serving on the same New York district court, Shira Scheindlin, had ruled the opposite way, and at the time Scheindlin's decision was widely celebrated on the op-ed pages...
...Amazingly enough, Wilentz manages in the space of a single Times oped to turn all three of Justice Scalia's straightforward messages upside-down...
...Chief Judge Mukasey, however, last week called Scheindlin's opinion "flawed" and "poorly reasoned...
...When last the nation heard from Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz, in November 2000, he was organizing a full-page New York Times advertorial in which various academic and Hollywood celebrities announced their solemn conclusion that Al Gore had just won a "clear constitutional majority of the popular vote...
...Wilkinson and his colleagues reversed that order and instructed the lower court to hold a full hearing on the merits of the question—while remaining attentive to the fact that “Our Constitution’s commitment of the conduct of war to the political branches of American government requires the court’s respect at every step...
...2) If he did think the death penalty was morally tantamount to state-organized murder, Scalia would feel obliged to resign from the bench rather than (a) uphold and enforce capital sentences that offended his conscience but were nevertheless perfectly legal...
...This is a group whose founder, Abdurahman Alamoudi, is a well-known supporter of Hamas and Hezbollah...
...THE SCRAPBOOK Gets Results...
...on Friday, July 12, Chief Judge Harvey Wilkinson of the Fourth U.S...
...Supreme Court stayed New Jersey District Court Judge John Bissell’s celebrated ruling last month that closed-door detention and deportation hearings in terrorism cases are unconstitutional...
...On Thursday, July 11, Chief Judge Michael Mukasey of the federal Southern District Court in New York issued a 37-page opinion upholding the statutory basis and constitutionality of the government's detention of illegal immigrants on "material witness" warrants connected with a grand jury terrorism investigation—whether or not they have been charged with a crime...
...We're quite sure the nation's newspapers, having exhaustively argued that John Ashcroft has the law all wrong, will now exhaustively discuss these . . . unexpected developments...
...A Winning Streak for Justice The Bush Justice Department's post-September 11 detention of terrorism suspects and witnesses has been regularly and roundly decried as unconstitutional in the nation's newspapers, to say the least...
...Why is the Bush administration sitting on a long-completed report on China’s military power...
...It’s disturbing to see the same spirit alive and well at events graced with the presence of the FBI director...
...At that conference, the jurist very clearly stated that: (1) He disagrees with the papal encyclical Evangelium Vitae and the current Catholic catechism, which are anti-death penalty...
...Just in case they don't, however, here's a brief scoresheet...
...And Wilentz continues to have trouble restraining himself from rushing into print with his resulting confusion...
...and (3) While democracy's tendency to "obscure the divine authority behind government" often leads devout citizens to the conclusion that they are entitled to disobey laws they believe morally unjust, Scalia thinks this a grave error...
...Also on Friday, the U.S...
...The same day that Mueller spoke, Alamoudi, in attendance at the convention, warned Eli Kintisch, the Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Forward, that it might not be “good for your health” to remain at one of the discussions (a panel session, ironically, on “American Muslims in the Media...
...This time around, we figure, even Rosie O'Donnell and Bianca Jag-ger were smart enough to turn him down...
...Circuit Court of Appeals, writing for a unanimous three-judge panel, concluded that Federal District Judge Robert Doumar had committed procedural error by ordering that detained Taliban fighter Yaser Hamdi—an American born in Louisiana to Saudi parents—be granted immediate, unsupervised access to a lawyer...
...The AMC later apologized and said its former leader wasn’t acting on its behalf...
...But we do have a theory about why he's published it as a solo act, instead of in multi-signatory advertorial form, as with the Gore thing in November 2000...
...Maybe they just needed a friendly nudge from THE SCRAPBOOK...
...Kintisch took the hint and left...
...But it seems he may never learn from his famous mistake, either, for judging by the good professor's latest New York Times excursion, he still has a basic-level reading comprehension problem when it comes to America's founding documents—or any other English-language text, for that matter...
...All in all, not a bad couple of days for the war on terrorism...
...or (b) use his power as a judge to override such perfectly legal sentences, thus imposing his religious views on a democratic polity that sees things differently...
...The People’s Republic of China’s ambitious military modernization casts a cloud over its declared preference for resolving differences over Taiwan through peaceful means,” the Pentagon assessment warns...
...No wonder...
...It was, as widely noted at the time, an elementary school dropout's sort of civics boner (there being no such thing as a constitutional majority of the popular vote for president), and The Scrapbook suspects that Wilentz will never fully live it down...
...Late last week, though, the administration won not one, not two, not three, but four separate and fairly significant federal judicial decisions in its effort to defend that detention policy...
...And in a separate case, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the government’s appeal of a circuit court decision striking down as unconstitutional the federal detention without bail of non-citizens who have been charged with a crime...
...Robert Mueller’s Muslim Outreach Afew weeks ago this page wondered what masochistic impulse had led FBI director Robert S. Mueller III to address the annual convention of the American Muslim Council...
...this page asked four weeks ago...
...THE SCRAPBOOK can't quite decide whether Wilentz's Scalia broadside is dishonest or simply dumb...
...2) shows "bitterness against democracy" and attempts to "rally the devout against democracy's errors...
...Elsewhere in this issue, Stephen Schwartz chronicles the pervasiveness of Wahhabi threats and intimidation in the American Muslim media...
...These days, though, the AMC distances itself from Alamoudi...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 43
