Informed Speculation

Hands up if you’re sick of the Supreme Court being hold hostage by the abortion ‘debate’ (as if anyone in the country still ‘debates’ this issue)…here’s Jan LaRue at Human Events Online:

The left is whipping itself into further frenzy over a newly released memo written by Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito 20 years ago. As a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, Alito expressed a strategy to “advance the goals of bringing about the eventual overruling of Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects.”

Only the left is shocked when a conservative lawyer working in a conservative administration acts like a conservative.

The memo argued that the administration should involve itself in a case before the Supreme Court, Thornburgh v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, to argue that the state regulations on abortion were “eminently reasonable and legitimate.” Alito referred to an abortionist as an “abortionist” and criticized another opinion, which struck down an ordinance that he said was “designed to preclude the mindless dumping of aborted fetuses into garbage piles,” as “almost incredible.”

Sen. Chuck (“I’m perpetually stunned”) Schumer (D-N.Y.) called the memo “stunning” and said it “casts serious doubt on whether Judge Alito can be at all objective on the right to privacy and a woman’s right to choose,” according to The Washington Post.

Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Wayward (PFAW), who’s been inhaling too much of his own smoke, told The Washington Times: It “isn’t just a smoking gun, it’s a smoking cannon.” You’d think their love affair with smoking guns would keep them from trying to gut the 2nd Amendment.

Enough already…

I’m considering a run for 2008 myself on the platform of overturning Roe v. Wade via a Constitutional amendment; my argument will not be that Roe is wrong or right, but rather that it is bad law, as even diehard supporters concede:

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said that the court overreached in Roe . In his indispensable new book, “Radicals in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts Are Wrong for America,” University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein — obviously no conservative — sees Roe as having “shaky constitutional foundations.”

While Sunstein questions the wisdom of overturning Roe now, he understands why it enraged so many conservatives. “With its ambitious ruling, not at all firmly rooted in precedent,” Sunstein writes, “the court allowed pro-life citizens to think that they had been treated with contempt — as if their own moral commitments could be simply brushed aside by federal judges.”

This is the kind of swamp judicial activism (or, if you prefer, Teddy Kennedy’s formulation of a judiciary that ‘may profoundly affect our progress as a nation toward the ideal of equality’, as opposed to, say, one that merely rules on the constitutionality of legal proceedings) leads us directly into…