We doubt these truths

...In many ways the treaties--from the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963 through the START agreements signed in 1991have been modest in their efforts to prevent nuclear war...

...THE THOMAS HEARINGS (FIRST ROUND) WE DOUBT THESE TRUTHS NATURAL LAW TAKES A BEATING n the morning of September 10, the day the Senate Judiciary Committee was to begin its hearings on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, I paged through the newspaper to learn when the telecast was to begin...

...If he did conduct himself improperly, he is now guilty of perjury...

...The trouble is that, after you have rejected the Communist order, you are stuck with the sheer fact of the world's disorder...

...If you have a fight to worship as you wish, I have a corresponding duty not to stop you...

...After all, these people were engaged in the difficult task of refounding their political system, and of necessity (I thought) the Thomas hearings would engage the committee members, the nominee, and other witnesses in discussion of some foundational principles of our own system, within which the Supreme Court is responsible for protecting 596: Commonweal (and hence for defining) constitutional rights...

...But it's time to review one's premises and revise predictions...

...Surely there are moderate and capable jurists acceptable to both the president and the Senate...

...Noting that he would question Judge Thomas about his use of natural law reasoning, Biden said that no one should take him to mean that all natural law thinking was bad...

...But the essential problem remains...

...In that atmosphere, which no public figure had the courage to challenge, how could Thomas prove that even one episode of aberrational behavior had not taken place...

...Neither "stumbling" nor "falling" quite captured the problem: nuclear forces of enormous power and complexity were maintained at hair-trigger readiness, while all agreed that their use would be insane...

...Only by restricting itself to pursuing those allegations which meet that threshold, can the committee keep itself from becoming a court of innuendo and smear...

...we do not question, for example, that Soviet citizens had a fight to freedom of expression before the arrival ofglasnost...

...Order] is the work of men and peoples who are able to say: There are truths, and we hold them...

...Where, then, are they rooted...

...A weekend of charges, counter-charges, and efforts to undermine everyone's testimony could not have resolved allegations that belonged in a court of law...

...the meaning of the German question has changed from who will control Germany to what a united Germany will be and do as part of a united Europe...

...One suspects he doesn't know the difference--and that not many among his colleagues or in the wider American public could do better...

...Hence, the rational objective was to control the strategic relationship in ways which reduced the chance of stumbling into nuclear war in a crisis or falling victim to a nuclear accident...

...WORLD WATCH J. Bryan Hehir THE PROLIFERATION PROBLEM A NEW PEACE TO WIN t's over...

...As Mr...

...that underlying constitutional and statutory law there exists a natural law...

...it is not a truth whereon to build...

...But one who accepts this order faces the further task of deciding where its borders lie, what is included and what is excluded under this concept...

...Was the Judiciary Committee too quick to dismiss Hill's allegations...

...There is a clear and constitutional resolution to the problem of nominations...

...We continue to affirm, but unreflectively, every person's inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness...

...I need to admit at the outset that I never thought I would say that in my lifetime...

...In fact, there is much we do not know about its inner workings...

...States ran the risk of stumbling or falling because the risk of being strategically vulnerable or politically intimidated by one's 598: Commonweal...

...irrelevant, for example, in discussions of affirmative action programs, where the guiding principles are those of remedial justice rather than individual rights...

...From the start, then, it was clear, and the hearings confmned, that Thomas was not a nominee of the highest caliber...

...The significance of the political changes of the last two years is that they offer the opportunity to move beyond managing the danger...

...Then the hearings began, continued, and ended...

...A combination of political and strategic choices, often driven by wider and deeper forces, has transformed the story of Danger and Survival (Random House), as McGeorge Bundy entitled his history of the nuclear age...

...and now apologies are in order--not just the conflict over allegations of sexual harassment that came to light after the hearings and as this article went to press, but for more basic reasons...

...we have not yet found reason to conclude that any political economy committed to these truths might find in them a duty to provide bread, work, and a humanizing education to all its people...

...the rights were there even though suppressed...

...If George Bush cannot be sure who these are, why not use the full rubric of the Constitution to seek the advice and consent of the Senate...

...Thomas's goal, I think, was to convince conservatives that their assertion of a natural duty not to abort a fetus was tied to a concern for fetal rights, and in turn to a concern for civil rights...

...One had to distinguish, he said, between good natural law and bad natural law...

...A natural law conceived as capable of defining only individual rights would be a poor and truncated thing...

...Thus the question of Thomas's character, which he had chosen to emphasize in the hearings, made it impossible for the Senate to proceed with its vote on October 8. Did the second round of hearings make us any more knowledgeable about Thomas's fitness for the Supreme Court...

...The revolution of 1989 in Eastern Europe ended the Warsaw Pact as a viable strategic threat and transformed the strategic challenge which NATO had been designed to counter...

...The mean and ugly spirit that dominates the nominations process must stop...

...It is arguable also that in his defense of Lewis Lehrman's natural law methodology, though he declined to say what natural law thinking affirms about abortion, Thomas managed to suggest that if one advocates for a natural or moral duty to protect the rights of the fetus, one may have to recognize a duty toward the rights of individuals of all races after they are born...

...yet there is no reason for disconnecting duties from rights...

...It wasn't easy, since the hearings had to share print space with so many eye-catching stories on events in the Soviet Union...

...But these difficulties point to the limits not of natural law but of human understanding...

...Thirty years ago, John Courtney Murray argued that the only "truth" upon which there was consensus in the United States was that communism was bad...

...Again, to speak of natural law only in connection with rights provides no roots for duties...

...Bush's address recognized, the nuclear danger from the Soviet Union now has been transformed from that of a conscious policy against the United States to the danger of chaos--an unplanned, unauthorized use of nuclear weapons...

...Genuine concerns about his lack of independence, integrity, and judicial abilities were sufficient to justify a "no" vote...

...The premise of the nuclear age was that fundamental political change in the East-West confrontation was either impossible or at least improbable...

...What if this behavior was an aberration in the life of a man otherwise extraordinarily upright and respectful of women...

...Anita Hill's allegations, although serious, were also ten years old and involved things that, if done, were done in private...

...In our view, the search for dirt and the leak were wrong on three counts: they violated the nomination process...

...If we are to serve as any sort of model for emerging nations and lead a new world order, we must again discuss seriously and reason rightly about whether any truths really are self-evident, what they are, and what they demand of us...

...What we call "human rights" are not created or conferred by government, but rather are independent of and superior to the governmental authority, and cannot be derived from it...

...they are not fecund but sterile...

...But these occasional, ad hoc attempts to discover a broad public philosophy do little more than demonstrate our own confusion and lack of consensus...

...Ordinary Americans, women as well as men, were quoted as asking themselves such common-sense questions that had become inadmissible in official circles...

...PAUL SRACIC Paul Sracic, a doctoral candidate at Rutgers University, is currently at work on a dissertation which examines the beliefs and role conceptions of Catholic judges...

...It would seem from what went on that we now have little if anything to teach anyone about founding principles...

...One thinks of a prescient observation made by John Courtney Murray, writing at the height of the cold war: If the Communist empire were to fall apart tomorrow, and if Communist ideology were to disintegrate with it, our problems would not be solved...

...bad" natural law would be the kind that includes among its precepts prohibitions against abortion and homosexual behavior...

...What civil libertarian, what Senate Democrat has expressed regret at the violation of the party's own political principles...

...Under its provisions, the Court has ruled that verbal as well as physical behaviour in the workplace can constitute sexual harassment...

...a well-chosen reference, since his argument explicitly relied on broad founding principles rather than constitutional principles, and since the Constitution, as originally ratified, explicitly accepted the denial of civil rights and even personhood to African-Americans...

...That is a quirky (and profoundly unphilosophic) distinction...

...Nuclear weapons still exist by the thousands but they do not and will not carry the threat to human life and survival which they have for the last two generations...

...Like a grand jury, the committee must decide not only how credible allegations are, but whether they are capable of resolution...

...In this connection it was interesting that during the hearings Clarence Thomas relied strongly on the Declaration of Independence, a founding rather than a ratified constitutional document...

...The permanent paradox of the nuclear era was the conviction that only by being consciously prepared to commit an irrational act could one rationally control the nuclear competition...

...Perhaps so...

...It may take Americans (and others) a very long time to reach consensus on whether the fight of choice or the right to life ranks higher, is more in accord with the data of biology and the purpose of human existence...

...That is part of what the law does, it helps enforce moral standards and change people's behavior...

...The philosophic confusion that would run through the hearings was established during initial questioning of the nominee by Senator Joseph Biden (D-Del...

...But that may have been as close as the hearings got to acknowledgment that as a people we are often confronted with situations that require attention to first principles, to the truths this nation 25 October 1991:597 was founded upon and continues to profess, but--if the committee's performance is any gauge--may have ceased to understand...

...If Mr...

...The cynicism displayed by both the president and his opponents is dismaying, but frankly we expected better of the latter...

...If so, I thought, they shouM be watching...

...More disheartening than the sorry state of imbalance in our system of checks and balances is the readiness of the usual defenders of fairness and procedural and civil rights to remain silent about the atmosphere of "anything goes," about the leak, and about the violation of Clarence Thomas's and Anita Hill's rights...

...With a tie vote of 7-7, the Judiciary Committee sent the nomination to the full Senate and it appeared that Thomas had enough votes to win approval...

...It is to counter that danger that the proposals to drastically reduce nuclear forces on both sides is directed...

...From the beginning reasonable people could foresee that these charges could not be resolved--as they were not...

...But in other ways they have been a substantial contribution to the challenge of managing the nuclear danger...

...In response to this political change, the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) was concluded and signed in 1991...

...and they violated the confidentiality promised Anita Hill by the Judiciary Committee...

...If the law and the current uproar over Hill's allegations result in changing men's behavior and encouraging women to speak up, that is to the good...

...It took the Roman Catholic church a very long time to acknowledge formally that coercion in matters of faith is fundamentally wrong...

...Despite the lack of clarity in Senator Biden's presentation, it may be profitable briefly to examine his dichotomy...

...The distraction made me wonder whether, thousands of miles away, delegates to the Russian parliament in Moscow were also checking TV schedules to see if CNN would be showing the confirmation process...

...they violated the right of Clarence Thomas to stand innocent until proven guilty...

...Or, for that matter, outside any system...

...Were the allegations the deeds of a mentally ill woman described with beady-eyed fervor by Orrin Hatch, or could they have been played out in any number of ways--ranging from offensive but unthreatening banter to sadistic torment of a woman employee...

...Even though much "cleaning up" will follow, it is useful in October 1991, twenty-nine years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, to simply declare the nuclear danger as we have known it to be over...

...How could he present any defense except his sweeping denials...

...they have their roots outside the system that has acknowledged their existence...

...The unification of Germany removed the prime political stake in the European theater...

...As the Thomas hearings demonstrated, our own foundational principles are becoming more elusive as they become more necessary...

...The nuclear terror, which shaped so much of the politics and strategy, as well as the literature and moral analysis of the last fifty years, is gone...

...But the nomination process and legitimate debate about Thomas's fitness for the Court were torpedoed by a leak to the media of Hill's charges of sexual harassment...

...Bush refuses, the Senate Judiciary Committee should put him on notice that it will reject all nominees--that is assuming, there be any willing to enter the maw of this voracious animal called public service...

...The phenomenon is not recent...

...And, since senators often have their own opinions about what these truths are, where they are to be discovered, and perhaps even who should be responsible for discovering them, it's to be expected that confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees will create a forum for discussion of founding principles, a kind of discussion notably absent from conventional political debate, and yet badly needed...

...It seems that by "good" natural law he referred to a natural law that would serve as the foundation for natural rights to equal treatment and to privacy...

...Could one claim that such conscious planning could coexist with stated fears about stumbling and falling...

...Unfortunately, he never told us, at least not clearly, how to tell the difference...

...George Bush should stop packing the Court...

...What caused the collapse...

...Today, pointing to the collapse of the Soviet system does nothing to solve the problems of poverty and unemployment (for example) in our own...

...If you have a fight to live, I may have a duty to feed and shelter you to the best of my ability...

...Since the Constitution itself suggests that its explicit enumeration of rights is not exhaustive, Supreme Court justices are at times required to go beyond the document itself and rely on broad truths or principles to settle difficult cases...

...The passing comment about negotiated treaties made above is not meant to denigrate the role they have played since the 1950s...

...Was the Senate better able to decide how to vote...

...There was a sound reason for the committee's course of action, whether or not it was the reason committee members had in mind...

...Moreover, and perhaps more basically, the concept of rights carries with it powerful implications for any political philosophy, for, as Ronald Dworkin and others point out, rights "trump" powers...

...The failed coup and consequent collapse of the Soviet Union as a viable political entity climaxed the two years of change...

...The fundamental reason for the demise of the nuclear danger was not any of the carefully calibrated arms control treaties of the last three decades, but the sweeping political change in the Soviet bloc from / 1989-91...

...But that perception is purely negative...

...proponents of the theory regard it not as an answer machine but as a way of thinking that is "connatural" to the human mind--and easily recognized as such by Americans, with their Jeffersonian conditioning to the concepts of "unalienable rights" and "self-evident truths...

...It took humankind a very long time to recognize that slavery is contrary to [human] nature...

...Before seeking the consent of the Senate to the appointment of a justice, seek its advice about suitable candidates...

...Once a right has been recognized and affirmed, the use of governmental authority to deny the exercise of that fight is inhibited, even if that authority is aimed at some general good, even if the authority commands the support of a majoritarian tyranny...

...More recently, President George Bush's remarkable address of September 27, and the equally significant response of President Mikhail Gorbachev, ordering withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons in the European theater completed what CFE began...

...How else could one of the witnesses before the committee assert that the use of natural law in constitutional theory was akin to using voodoo to interpret Buddhism--and meet with no rebuke...

...Clarence Thomas, innocent or guilty, has been caught in rising standards of behavior embodied in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act...

...So, I thought, listen hard, Mikhail, Boris, and the rest of you: you'll learn what we're about...

...But Clarence Thomas, innocent or guilty, has also been caught in a public atmosphere that makes all distinctions virtually impossible...

...The acknowledgement of individual rights implies that they are part of a larger order, a moral or natural order...

...Not only are we ignorant of who, if anyone, is telling the truth, but it was predictable from the start that this ignorance could not be overcome responsibly outside of a court of law...