Conservatives have a serious problem, and it is marketing. There is nothing progressive about the Progressives, who feel that the masses must be forced to act as a limited elite will dictate. Look it up, that is the actual meaning of Progressive.
There is nothing more revolutionary or forward-thinking than a faithful exercise of the awesome rights and responsibilities spelled out in our Constitution, and nothing more backward or tyrannic than the imposition of will upon the many by the few.
Talk of revolution is good. We had one in the late eighteenth century, and I for one am committed to it. So, by the way, is every person who has sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. Some are more clear on this point than others.
Furthermore, a recent unwarranted squeamishness about political discourse notwithstanding, there is nothing wrong with the idea of liberty being maintained at the meager expense of the blood of tyrants. “Why, you can’t mean that!”
Ah, but I do. If you know what a tyrant is, then you can hardly oppose killing them. The United States is not a tyranny. Iraq was. Burma and North Korea are. Cuba and Iran, probably. Venezuela might be, if not now, then soon.
When organizations or phenomena take countries over, those too can be tyrannies. Taliban. Narcotraficantes. The Russian government-within-a-government.
America is more than simply a nation which was founded through a rebellion from tyranny. It is in fact a response to tyranny. The world is not infinitely wide, and civilization has not lasted forever. The world as it is and as it has been is a limited number of cases which may be gone through in short order to identify superlative examples.
Alas, of bad examples there are so many that it profits us not at all to enumerate them. Some of the most evil stand readily apparent, but
There is a popular strain of criticism in which any activity whatsoever by the Supreme Court is called Judicial Activism. If a fairly Conservative court rolls back decisions which departed from an originalist reading of the Constitution, this is not activism merely because it upsets the “settled” law of the land. The activist part comes not from action, but from acting in place of a legislature. Congress is the mechanism by which new ground is broken, new territory explored, new laws enacted. The Executive carries them out of course, and the Judicial branch is tasked with reviewing those laws if and when they are challenged.
The idea that the Supreme Court should find new and un-legislated mening in the Constitution every time it is asked to decide on a particular law (this should be a yes-or-no kind of thing, with space to explain the answer below) is what the left calls a “Living Constitution”, and what the right calls “Judicial Activism”.
Supreme Court decisions which rely upon the unsubstatiated fancies of the justices as to the changing nature of America, and indeed of the world beyond the borders, may be good and may be correct, but it in no way follows from the COnstitution that those are what the Supreme Court is for. No matter how right the Supreme Court may be about something, their only vocabulary should be “Constitutional” or “UnConstitutional” and an explanation of how that decision was reached. Just as the laws passed by Congress are now required to cite their Constitutional authority, so should Supreme Court decisions. This is already a reguirement, of course, but one which has been honored less and less as time goes by. Therefore we now suffer from emanations, aurae, penumbrae. Where in the Constitution is the right to privacy? Moreover, where in the Constitution does the state have the right to make decisions for a child whose parents are not under suspicion, much less judgement of any sort of abuse or neglect of that child? Thought so.
it is not that the Court is necessarily wrong in decisions it issues this way. It is that the process has broken down, and while we may be on a trajectory which does not alarm people now, without the orignal mechanism in good working order, we have few indicators of our deviations from a safe course, and few methods to take timely effective action to correct things. We are stuck with the catch-all of “Gee, if things really get bad enough, the people won;t stand for it.” That is good to know, of course, but that should be the last line of defense, not the first.
It is not as though Conservatives feel that only the legislature is legitimate. There have been times when the legislature or the several states were dead wrong, and the Supreme Court was right. “What? How can this be?” I hear you ask.
