September 21, 2007
Profiles in judicial jackassery
National Review's Ed Whelan takes a look at a New York Times Sunday Magazine puff piece on Supreme Court Justice Stevens, including this disturbing glimpse into the mind of a legal giant hack.
Rosen provides a truly bizarre anecdote about how Stevens’s World War II experience shaped Stevens’s views on the death penalty:
[Stevens] helped break the code that informed American officials that Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy and architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, was about to travel to the front. Based on the code-breaking of Stevens and others, U.S. pilots, on Roosevelt’s orders, shot down Yamamoto’s plane in April 1943.Once again, Stevens’s judgment is a pure policy judgment that has nothing to do with where the Constitution vests decisionmaking authority on the death penalty. Stevens’s particular sympathy for Admiral Yamamoto also seems badly confused. I suppose that we can be grateful that Osama bin Laden never lived in the United States and never became friends with the Americans he killed, or Stevens’s rulings in national-security cases might be even worse than they are.Stevens told me he was troubled by the fact that Yamamoto, a highly intelligent officer who had lived in the United States and become friends with American officers, was shot down with so little apparent deliberation or humanitarian consideration. The experience, he said, raised questions in his mind about the fairness of the death penalty.
“I was on the desk, on watch, when I got word that they had shot down Yamamoto in the Solomon Islands, and I remember thinking: This is a particular individual they went out to intercept,” he said. “There is a very different notion when you’re thinking about killing an individual, as opposed to killing a soldier in the line of fire.” Stevens said that, partly as a result of his World War II experience, he has tried on the court to narrow the category of offenders who are eligible for the death penalty and to ensure that it is imposed fairly and accurately.
Stevens' career has been nothing but policy-making, masquerading as judging, resulting in decades of horrendous decisions. Whelan cautions, "[T]he careful reader will discern the incoherence and idiosyncratic willfulness that mark Stevens’s Supreme Court career."
I couldn't agree more.
The passage on the death penalty and Yamamoto is troubling for a variety of reasons, amongst them the implicit elitist belief that the death of one, cultured officer is essentially state-sanctioned homicide, therefore much less palatable than the slaughter of unwashed enlisted men in more random ground combat.
That Stevens could extrapolate from this incident to a broader "principle" with some -- heck, any -- application to death-penalty jurisprudence is risible.
Posted by Mike Lief at September 21, 2007 02:43 PM
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Comments
This variety of judicial arrogance is becoming common to the point that it threatens the very notion of our constitutional republic. Rather than serving dutifully within the limitations of their appointed roles, many jurists feel the need to rule by oligarchy as they mandate policy from the bench.
Can't get some cockeyed bill through Congress? Never fear for a judicial leftist will rub his ACLU card between his hands, peer into his crystal ball and proclaim a new policy that just jumped out of the "living Constitution."
The rest of us apparently aren't smart enough to see these hidden messages in the Constitution. Only the enlightened can see them when the time is right. Like a Beatles album played backwards, only the enlightened can perceive and interpret the hidden truths that lie dormant in the static of the Constitution.
When our founding fathers framed the Constitutional contract which outlined the agreement between the states and the division of government and power, apparently they did so in a way that exceeded the ability of the average person to even know what they were agreeing to.
This trend is an affront to the basic principles of democracy and representative government that we live and abide by. Why should people feel the need to gather support for a referendum or legislative bill by raising money, holding rallies, exchanging ideas through open debate, and ultimately voting when they know that within hours, a leftist pinhead wearing a black dress will issue subversive decrees to the great fanfare of "social progressives."
Judicial activists are thieves dressed in black. They steal and pillage the American blood right of representative government.
Posted by: Bill H. at September 23, 2007 08:49 AM