Most disturbing about all this, however, is the initial observation made by the WSJ’s editorial writers:  “A single liberal retirement from the Court would thus put Hamdan‘s reasoning in jeopardy.”

How can this be?  How can it be that we’ve reached the point where highly-charged SCOTUS decisions often break along partisan / ideological lines?  (And before you go noting Kennedy’s break, note, too, that Kennedy defected on Kelo, as well, expanding “public good” to mean “whatever a local municipality can justify by arguing that it will bring in more revenue”.  And to be fair, I think Scalia guilty of the same flawed “reasoning” in Raich).

The answer to why this is now so, I think—how “reasoning” become so completely relativistic—is that we no longer have a unified strategy for how to interpret, with the idea of a Living Constitution often acting as a judicial shortcut for failed legislative initiatives, which has the practical effect of codifying a strained (and logically problematic) idea of interpretation and how it is made to work, allowing its proponents to move back and forth between readings that cite legislative intent and readings that deny the importance of that intent in new and different “contexts.”

Be sure to read the whole thing

July 5th, 2006 | Judiciary and Law Stuff, Politics | No comments

Hoping We Fail: Who loses and who wins in the high-stakes poker in Iraq?

This was a piece Victor Hanson wrote in 2003. It was recently re-presenced on his web site with this preface:

The recent hysteria and rush to judgement over alleged Marine crimes at Haditha, and the downplaying of the significance of the capture of al Zarqawi suggest that many, here and abroad, simply wanted the United States to lose in Iraq, for a variety of political reasons. Almost three years ago, VDH outlined the motives of these parties and suggested it was unwise to bet against the Americans in Iraq, especially since democracy would eventually emerge and ties between al Qaeda and Saddam’s police state would probably come to light. [em. mine]

And of course, those ties are now coming to greater light through the slow, painful, understaffed and underemphasized process of translating Iraqi documents into English.

However Stephen F. Hayes has been on the case for a few years. This post is not the oldest, nor the most recent, but it had the highest google ranking for the terms I searched.

Anywho…

Hoping We Fail is an excellent roundup of all the usual suspects and some of their underlying pathologies that lead them to root for failure–or perceive it as primary where there is more evidence for success on the balance.

It begins thusly:

It is not hard to determine who wishes the United States to succeed in rebuilding Iraq along lines that will promote consensual government, personal freedom, and economic vitality: hardly anyone. At least, few other than the Iraqi and American people.

July 3rd, 2006 | Global War On Terror, International Politics | No comments