[extropy-chat] Re: SCOTUS rulings and replacements

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Brett Paatsch <bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au> wrote:
> 
> I don't really get what the judiciary committee does in relation to
> what the Senate does. Does the judiciary committee perhaps conduct
> inquiries for a time until say the President hurrumphs and says
> "dammit
> stop delaying, put my nominee to the vote of the Senate and lets
> see if we can smoke out some anti-voter filibusterers," or what?

In order to ostensibly streamline the work of the Senate (the House
works similarly), members form into committees to  consider bills,
resolutions, etc. and members try to get on committees that they have
an interest in, or their constituents have a significant interest in
(like senators from agricultural states being on the Agriculture
Committee, etc). Senior senators vie for chairmanships because
committee chairs decide what bills before their committees get voted on
in what order, if at all, so they are positions of power.

The Judiciary Committee, among other things, examines in depth judge
candidates for federal judgships and ultimate for supreme court justice
seats. They also examine the presidents appointments for Attorney
General, FBI, and other law enforcement agency appointments, treaties,
etc. 

What is interesting in this case is that Arlen Specter is the chair of
the senate judiciary committee. He is a celebrated moderate RINO from
Pennsylvania who is famous outside his senate seat for being the
original attorney of infamous murderer and fugitive Ira Einhorn, who
killed his girlfriend Holly Maddux and kept her body in a chest in his
closet for several years before police found it. Ira fled the US to
Ireland, Sweden, and finally France, where he was found and apprehended
with his scandanavian wife and went through two extradition proceedings
in France because the French extorted the people of PA into waiving
Einhorn's death penalty and chance of getting it in a new trial, in
order to get their hands back on him. Whether Specter advised Einhorn
to flee the US is unknown to this day.

Specter raised the ire of conservatives in the past several months over
comments attributed to him where he warned the White House against
sending him non-moderate judges, a statement he denied making, however
he was part of the group of RINO senators that undercut Senate Majority
Leader Bill Frist's campaign to get all Bush judge appointees an up or
down vote before the full Senate.

> 
> > The REAL question is whether President Bush's candidate will be so 
> > conservative as to trigger a showdown with a Democrat filibuster,
> or 
> > moderate enough to avoid it and still not disaffect his
> conservative base. 
> > We won't know that until July 8th, when he gets back from the G8
> Summit 
> > and makes his nominee known.
> 
> That is certainly interesting.  It is just the Senate that votes
> though isn't it?

If the candidate can get out of committee, yes, he gets a full senate
vote. Getting out of Committee is the hard part.
> 
> PS: Mike, your post mentions the term "constructionist" what do you
> mean by that term, is it a commonly used classification, and if so,
> what is its opposite? Who on the current court for instance would you
> regard as constructionists and the opposite to constructionists? 

A constructionist is also described by Justice Scalia as an
"originalist", in that a constructionist or originalist interprets the
constitution according to the original intent or original meaning of
the clear language construction of the document.

In the founders view, "general welfare" was not a social safety net,
but the management of the performance of the economy, therefore Alan
Greenspan's job at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors is closer to
the original meaning of that term than whoever is running Health and
Human Services or the Social Security Administration. Similarly "the
militia" was specifically NOT the active duty military, but "the whole
of the people", in the words of George Mason and James Madison,
therefore the average Joe practicing his rifle shooting at the gun club
is the real militia and participating in neighborhood watch patrols and
the State Guard, not the Department of Defense.

The opposite of a constructionist or originalist is an "evolutionist",
who believes that the meaning of the Constitution changes, or can be
changed by judicial review, to meet the changing needs of an advancing
society. The problem with this is "legislating from the bench" in which
law is made by person who were not elected, but there is also a much
more insidious problem in this view, and that is that the definitions
of words are intentionally changed over time by judicial activists,
particularly those who edit legal dictionaries. 

By inventing new definitions of the words that describe our laws, you
change the meaning of the law without amending one word through
legislative or judicial processes, if you go by the evolutionist
approach. This is therefore an extremely subversive and legalistically
a form of insurgency or coup d'etat: if you can change how people think
the words that describe what the state stands for mean, you change the
government without an election or a shot being fired. This is the same
problem I described in my essay "Unsafe at any speed" that was
published as part of the "3 Laws Unsafe" campaign of SIAI: if you
change the meanings of the words of a programming language, you change
the function of the program, which can have many dangerous, unforseen
consequences that need to be extensively studied and modelled and
contemplated by a properly qualified deliberative body.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com


		
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