“Balancing” the Court
Expect something like this to be the liberal refrain over the course of the next few months as regards the SCOTUS openings, particularly if that codger Stevens steps down, in addition to Sandy and, apparently, Rehnquist:
“President Bush is determined to pack the Court with extremists who will tailor their decisions to the far right, fundamentalist fringe. We need people who will provide balance to the Court.” I’d be willing to bet good money that the word “balance” will be a major talking point for the libs in days to come as they come half-unglued over the prospect of constructionists gaining a majority on the SCOTUS. “Balance”…sounds like a great word, doesn’t it? Sounds so…so…balanced!
There are two problems with this kind of thinking:
1.) The Supreme Court is not an institution that should be “balanced”; that’s a nonsensical viewpoint. You don’t “balance” two good eggs in an omelet with two rotten ones. You don’t “balance” a fat guy on a seesaw with a jockey; it doesn’t work that way. There are some things where “balance” isn’t what you strive for, and the Supreme Court is one of those things. What we need on the Supreme Court is nine people—yes, all nine—who believe that the job of the Court is to interpret the Constitution, and the nation’s laws, by using their best understanding of what the actual law, written on paper, meant when it was passed in the first place. That’s all we ask: judges who will look at the law and take it seriously, instead of making it up as they go along based upon some grab-it-out-of-the-breeze concept of “justice”. No…”justice” means applying the law, and if the law is unjust, it’s up to the legislators to change it—not a 5-4 majority of renegades who don’t like what the law says.
2.) What liberals mean by “balance” is “there must be more liberals than conservatives on the Court”. They never screamed “balance” when Clinton was shoveling Ruth Ginsberg and Steven Breyer our way; would the liberals have cried “balance!” had Scalia stepped off the Court during Clinton’s term? Yeah, right. Further, what most drives liberals in Congress is the sacrament of feminism, abortion-on-demand. I daresay that you could find a judge whose rulings were pretty much down the line with conservative thinking, and if he/she supported Roe, the libs wouldn’t say much, if anything. Whether or not that’s the case, the fact is that, to liberals, the current Court was too out-of-balance, because there were four solid activists (Breyer, Stevens, Souter, and Ginsburg), three constructionists (Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas), and two thoroughly-confused justices (O’Connor and Kennedy, loose cannons who couldn’t be consistently counted on to toe the liberal activist agenda). Just a little more balance—which means naming another activist, again to “balance” the Court—is what the libs will scream for.
This phrase comes from the 1978 "Jonestown massacre" in which most members of the Peoples Temple cult, blindly following their leader Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid.
Osborne: A Contrarian's Guide to Knowing God
Schlossberg: Idols For Destruction
