The Other Alito

Well, not really. Bit a great many good judges were prevented from taking the bench afte ra Presidential appointment, many as a result of having been Borked. John Hawkins at Right Wing News was fortunate enough to conduct an interview with one such judge: Charles Pickering. Check it out.

Charles Pickering: Well, the amendment that I’m proposing, if opponents of Rove v. Wade felt like that this amendment was going to repeal Roe v. Wade, they would fight it teeth and tong -- by the same token, conservatives who think Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided (would fight for it). Incidentally I don’t know of hardly any -- most all constitutional scholars today, whether they’re liberal or conservative, acknowledge that Roe v. Wade was a stretch – that it’s just really difficult to find that in the Constitution.

Comments

[jolari]

Good promo for his new book

[beautifulatrocities]

I always think opponents of Roe - Constitutional, not moral - are in a tug of war here, because a judge who strictly interprets the Constitution would to my mind also have a healthy respect for precedent. The question is how much damage has Roe done to the country (again, Constitutionally, by inventing rights out of whole cloth), vs how much damage caused by overturning it decades later. I do think the opponents of Roe have done a bad job of making the good point that it's democratic to return the issue to state voters

[Phoenix]

"The question is how much damage has Roe done to the country (again, Constitutionally, by inventing rights out of whole cloth), vs how much damage caused by overturning it decades later."

This is a good point. Using Occam's Razor in this tiresome debate, it boils down to which justices are willing to state that the Supreme Court made a mistake of this magnitude.

[Bill]

Of course, if stare decisis existed in science or many other areas of life, we'd have no modern medicine, the world would still be flat, etc. Judges like all of us are fallible. Mistakes are made. As a scientist, I spend my life challenging the "laws" of science. Judges should do the same. Tacit acceptance is trouble with a capital T.

The people do not need amendments offered by congress to change how our government (including judges) works. We hold in our hands the legitimate authority to rewrite our entire Constitution or simply write our own amendments of the Constitution whenever we decide it becomes necessary.

The amendment process in Article V of the US Constitution is a set of rules created by the People to control the government and force the government to ask our permission when the government feels the need for more powers than have been allowed. We do not need their permission. We merely need a simple majority of support for amendments proposed by the People, i.e. 50% + 1 vote. The difficulty is in getting amendments started at the grass-roots level and carrying the process to its end.

In recap, there are three methods for constitution amendment. 1) Congress offers an amendment to get permission from the People; 2) the States hold a Constitutional Convention and prepare amendments to get permission from the People; 3) some of the People prepare amendments and offer them to the whole of the People for approval. The first two require the standard supermajorities as spelled out in the US Constitution while the third is the inherent right of the majority because the governments are asking the People's permission.

I leave you with a quote from the Declaration of Independence:

"That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;"

I suggest that the theft of power by the SC and other parts of the federal government are no longer light nor transient.