The DNC blog
Kicking Ass is
touting a flawed op-ed by Eugene Robinson which appears in todays
Washington Post.
While not a horrible op-ed, it is nothing out-of-the-park since Mr. Robinson still falls into the traps of GOP terminology and terms of debate.
(more below the fold)
Witness this passage:
"I fully realize that I'm a proud product of judicial activism myself, since, if not for Brown v. Board of Education, I surely wouldn't be where I am."
Ah, no Mr. Robinson, you where not helped by "judicial activism" in the Brown v. Board of Education decision, you were helped by an independent court, squaring discriminatory state law with the Constitutional requirements of the 14th amendment and the princple of equal protection under the law for all people. The court found that state segregation laws and practices violated the Constitution. That is not "judicial activism" but the very role the SCOTUS is intended to fulfill as a separate coequal branch of Government. Its function is to keep the other branches power in check and that laws and execution of the laws and that enaction of legislation conform to Constitutional principles.
He then goes on to falsely equate the proper actions by the SCOTUS in Brown v Board of Education, with the actions of radical-wrong partisans from the GOP who are attempting to pack the courts with ideologues, and are so bent on this goal they are about to destroy the deliberative process and rules of the Senate which have been in place since its inception some 217 years ago.
This is a false equivalency, with Mr. Robinson basically saying past "judicial activism" of Brown v Board of Education is good, but this is bad. The SCOTUS doing its job and fulfilling its function is not "judicial activism". Such an argument is a fundamentally flawed case of false equivalency, and one in which Mr. Robinson falls prey to the very framing of the debate with pre-loaded terminology that the GOP has spent billions of dollars and decades to push into the public psyche and dialog.
I am actually quite surprised to see this getting past the Kicking Ass bloggers at the DNC as well.