UP FROM ACTIVISM
Methvin, Eugene H .
UP FROM ACTIVISM Up Frorr Activism: A New Court? by Eugene H. Methvin F INDEED THE SENATE'S 58-42 confirmation of Justice Samuel Alito is to prove a turning point in the titanic conflict of...
...For the last five decades the activist Justices have provoked bitter dissents from within and without...
...Over the next five years, Bork says his vote would have changed the result offour major 5-4 decisions...
...They govern through our 3,072 counties and 91,185 local governments...
...In two states judges ordered tax increases and told legislators how they must spend the money...
...When interpreting the Constitution, he declared, judges "must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society...
...After the Warren Court's 1966 54 Miranda decision, police effectiveness dropped quickly...
...We elect farmer committees to oversee dispensation of federal funds, public sewer commissioners, coroners...
...have voided 48 state laws against...
...7Kennedy and Bill Clinton, 1963-93, named ten straight Justices without wresting control from the activists...
...Judges in dozens of states rushed to take over prisons and jails...
...After a federal judge seized control of Texas prisons, murders among inmates, virtually unheard of previously, began occurring at the rate of one a day...
...The Justices would not elected officials substantial authority to regulate abortion and to permit public school prayer...
...Four years later President Kennedy created a solid activist majority behind Warren when he named Arthur Goldberg to succeed Felix Frankflarter, the great advocate of judicial restraint...
...But sometimes it takes decades...
...In 1976 five Justices allowed Arkansas high schoolers to sue their principal and school board members personally for punishing them for pouring alcoholic beverages in the punch at a PTA meeting...
...Previously police solved more than 91 percent of murder cases, but unsolved murders quadrupled...
...Nixon nominee Harry Blackmun, Ford nominee John Paul Stevens, and George H.W...
...ADLY, THE FOUR REPUBLICAN ~ presidents between John E...
...But now the administrators can't get rid of the habitually disruptive students...
...This is King George stuff...
...Once judges decide "evolving standards" require a new "constitutional" ruling, they exclude voters and elected legislators from participating and create a new imperial domain for judges...
...The prospect of being dragged into Court for violating vague "constitutional rights" produced an abdication by the disciplinarians and classroom anarchy...
...Explained one New York junior-high teacher: "I used to walk down the hall, see a student bullying another, and we'd 18 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2006 EUGENE H. METHVIN go see the principal...
...flag-burning or 23 state laws limit- Eugene H. Methvin, a Washinging congressional terms...
...They may be the most cited words in American case law over the last half-century...
...For example, in 1968 Warren and his activists decided the Des Moines, Iowa, school board could not stop second-graders from wearing armbands protesting the Vietnam war...
...In many ways the battle was most importantly joined in an obscure 1958 decision in which Chief Justice Earl Warren uttered a war whoop of judicial activism...
...Seven years later a federal judge in Georgia compelled county commissioners in Crisp County, Georgia, to provide prisoners with air conditioning and television-amenities many poor Crisp Countians could not afford-under threat of having their jail held "unconstitutional...
...by Eugene H. Methvin F INDEED THE SENATE'S 58-42 confirmation of Justice Samuel Alito is to prove a turning point in the titanic conflict of governmental philosophies that is played out in the Supreme Court, it's worth reviewing how we got to this point in the first place...
...Adopting Warren's "living Constitution" ideology as a license, every judge with an itch for political power set himself up as a high priest free to impose his vision of"evolving standards of decency" on the rest of America...
...None of these judicial imperialists ever explained how the nation's 857 federal judges who serve for life without ever facing the voters can reflect the entire nation's "evolving standards" more reliably than the 521,000 public officials we elect every six years...
...Polls consistently show they have been out of step with large popular majorities, bringing the Court's prestige to record lows...
...Only time will tell whether the new Supreme Court lineup will produce a federalist restoration...
...Explained Atlanta's veteran prosecutor Lewis Slaton: "We end up not solving many big cases because with the Miranda warnings we talk the suspect out of telling us anything...
...The only Democrat, Jimmy Carter, got no opportunity to make a nomination...
...Thus the Justices cast themselves off from the moorings of a written Constitution and transformed the Court into a sitting constitutional convention, subject to the oracular whims and passions of individual psychology...
...So now I walk on by...
...Constant 3-1 majorities, for example, favor the death penalty and voluntary school prayer, which the activist Justices oppose...
...They take away our greatest right, which is the freedom to govern ourselves democratically," says Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was defeated by liberal Democratic senators in 1987...
...Warren's words became the battle cry of judges in a war on our grassroots democratic institutions...
...Dooley wrote, "The Supreme Court follows the election returns...
...In the 1987 "Battle of Bork," the 55-45 Democratic Senate defeated Reagan's conservative nominee by a 58-42 vote, and instead confirmed Reagan's second nominee, Anthony Kennedy...
...As the fabled humorist Mr...
...The proportion of violent crimes that went unsolved zoomed nearly 60 percent...
...MAY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 19...
...Reagan's 1981 nominee Sandra Day O'Connor cast the deciding fifth vote in some 146 of the 192 cases that produced 5-4 splits in her last eleven years on the Court, more than any other Justice, and she often voted with the activists on critical social issues...
...Democratic activist Hodding Carter candidly conceded that the Bork nomination "forces liberals like me to confront a reality we don't want to confront, which is that we are depending in large part on the least democratic institution, with a small 'd,' in government to defend what we no longer are able to win out there in the electorate...
...From Frankihrter, John Marshall Harlan, and Hugo Black to Antonin Scalia, Justices have filed stinging dissents, and legal scholars have produced scalding critiques of the dominant activists...
...So when you warn a kid, he just shrugs it off...
...In 1968 Warren Era activists decided the Constitution's "evolving standards of decency" prohibited floggings with a leather strap in Arkansas prisons...
...and would ton-based journalist, has reported have returned to state and local on the Supreme Court since 1958...
...Bush nominee David Souter turned out to be liberal activists...
...protested one Kansas City official, and a state legislator threatened to dump teabags into the Missouri River...
...Robbery clearance rates dropped by more than a third...
...In Florida voters even choose county mosquito control officers...
...In similar fashion the Justices kicked voters and locally elected officials out of participating in vital decisions and placed them in the laps of 678 federal district judges...
...Only 537 of these elected officials are federal, 535 in Congress, two in the executive branch...
...We elect 7,562 state legislators, most of the 97,000 members who sit on our 16,000 school boards, and hundreds of thousands of city and county legislators and executives...
...Washington lawyer-activist Joe Rauh, a key signal-caller in the antiBork battle, admitted his own antidemocratic bias because his liberal version of civil rights could hardly survive "the dangers inherent in the thousands of cities, towns, counties and other local bodies...
...By 1992 the activist restrictions on reasonable investigations was costing Americans more than 4,000 additional unsolved murders and 70,000 unsolved robberies every year...
...With the bodies figuratively piling high on his doorstep, the judge restored much authority to state authorities, and inmate murders fell to only one a year...
Vol. 39 • May 2006 • No. 4
