THE STANDARD READER
The Standard Reader Books in Brief Disrobed: The New Battle Plan to Break the Left's Stranglehold on the Courts by Mark W. Smith (Crown Forum, 272 pp., $25.95). Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr....
...Indeed, he writes that all three notions are "utopian fantasies" and "a false idol...
...Or at least little Machiavellis, if Mark W. Smith had his way...
...But conservatives have always understood that once the careful structure of government is ignored or dismantled, the whole citizenry will be vulnerable to predations by the left as a result of even the slightest or most seemingly temporary shift in power to the left's advantage...
...Conservatives should cite foreign precedents if doing so helps them win...
...At best," Smith writes, "phrases such as 'judicial restraint,' 'strict constructionism' and 'originalism' are, in effect, shorthand—code words for the judicial outcomes the Right favors...
...But Atwater's job was to elect presidents and senators, not to select judges...
...But Smith shows himself to be far less a conservative legal theorist than a right-wing political hit-man...
...The lesson is simple: We're all judicial activists now...
...In doing so, it provides a wealth of ammunition to the far left to accuse conservatives of hypocrisy and perfidious intent...
...In Mark W. Smith's new book Disrobed: The New Battle Plan to Break the Left's Stranglehold on the Courts, former law school professor Smith all but says that three generations of conservatives have been imbecilic—strategically obtuse, tactically blind—in their approach to issues of the courts and the Constitution...
...What's apparent from Disrobed is somewhere in the soul of attorney Mark W. Smith is a political campaign consultant yearning to breathe free...
...Smith criticizes the political right for being "process-oriented," and for its tendency to "confuse the mechanisms of government with the greater ends...
...For that, there are procedures outlined by the Constitution, designed to identify men and women most able to use right reason to defend that Constitution's principles...
...The late Lee Atwater would have heartily approved of Smith's combativeness and of his in-the-moment political savvy...
...As the author of the New York Times best-selling The Official Handbook of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, Smith clearly is more interested in scoring showy political victories than in developing a principled, intellectually consistent, conservative jurisprudence...
...And: "The reliance on foreign legal precedents as a mode of argument is something else to which conservatives should adjust...
...Indeed, Disrobed reads like nothing so much as a parody by Ted Kennedy/Chuck Schumer of what conservatives actually believe...
...once infamously wrote in a Supreme Court decision that "three generations of imbeciles are enough...
...The book at hand mocks those procedures, and in so doing makes a mockery of the Constitution's principles in the name of saving them...
...Quin Hillyer...
...After all, Smith makes most of Schumer's arguments for him...
...And: "We need results-oriented [Smith's emphasis] judges devoted to advancing fundamental American principles...
...In what amounts to a book-length argument that two wrongs make not just a right but a far right, Smith argues—with annoying repetitiveness—that the way to "thwart the loony Left's assault on America" is to use "judicial activism" as a "secret weapon" to achieve right-wing goals...
Vol. 11 • August 2006 • No. 46
