Monday, April 26, 2010
Damned activist judges
Turns out that menace to society is not those of a liberal bent, but the conservatives who are more devoted to an agenda than to the law. E.J.Dionne looks at this problem in light of the upcoming nominee for the Supreme Court.
Conservative judges are regularly invoking their alleged fealty to the "original" intentions of the Founders as a battering ram against attempts to limit the power of large corporations. Such entities were not even in the imaginations of those who wrote the Constitution. To claim to know what the Founders would have made of Exxon Mobil or Goldman Sachs or PepsiCo is an exercise in arrogance.Equally important as the SCOTUS nominee are the many judges at the various levels of the judicial system. By blocking Obama's nominees, the radical right is working to upset the balance between honest judges and conservative judges.
What liberals forgot during the years when their side dominated the judiciary is that for much of our history, the courts have played a conservative role. But today's conservatives have not forgotten this legacy. Their goal is to overturn the past 70 years of judicial understandings and bring us back to a time when courts voided minimum-wage laws and all manner of other economic regulations.
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