Thank God for King George, who is saving us from ourselves round-the-clock, 24-7, high-tech-style. Never mind that the sucking sound we've been hearing for the last several years is the sound of the liberty baby rushing down the drain, along with the freedom bathwater. The ironies of the moment would be funny, were they not so indicative of the mortal danger our republic is in. Here are just a few of those ironies to contemplate, while the nation ponders whether it should save itself, and throw the Patriot Act, the NSA, and the King Himself, into the Boston Harbor.
C'est tres ironique:I find it utterly ironic that King George disparages the French at every turn. (Apparently, he has never forgiven them for assisting America to throw off its colonial chains and establish itself as a free nation.) But despite his antipathy for almost all things French, George W. Bush retains an intense fondness for walking around saying, in an execrable French-Texas accent, "L'etat, c'est Moi!" and "Dieu, et mon Droit!" He's just tickled red that it rhymes. Lest anyone mistake him for an elitist Frenchy, though, we absolutely hates French wines. He'll stick to the Calvados, thank you very much.
Inherent Rights, No. Inherent Authority, Yes:
I find it utterly ironic that King George insists that none of his judicial nominees should enforce the Ninth Amendment, which clearly refers to inherent rights of the people:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." --Amendment IX, U.S. Constitution.
According to George, enforcement of the literal wording of the Ninth Amendment is, of course, the quintessence of judicial activism. Yet he also insists that his loyal strict constructionists should find in the Constitution, an Amendment IX.1 as it were:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain Presidential powers, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the President.
Funny how that works, no? Reading an existing amendment OUT of the Constitution is judicial activism. Reading a non-existent amendment INTO the Constitution is strict construction.
I say To-mah-to and dammit, You'd better say To-mah-to, too:
I find it utterly ironic that King George would try so hard to foist some of the most biddable, most sycophantic people in America onto the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, Courts of Appeal, district courts, and secret FISA court, yet doesn't trust any of them to rule his way on a simple trap-and-trace warrant. Apparently, 5 denials out of 19,000 requests for search warrants from a super-secret, hand-picked court shows way, way too much independence of thought.
Liberty Is Anarchy:
Speaking of the judiciary and the judicial activism/strict constructionism debate, I find it utterly ironic that the conservative judiciary, of all people, have such a hard time with the basic notion of liberty. We all know this one -- we could say it in our sleep:
"It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is." --Marbury v. Madison (1803)
The conservative take on this makes it all sound so easy; Jeremy C., a young and callow conservative who blogs at conservative-nation.blogspot.com, insists that "kook liberals fail to understand what the job of the Supreme Court is, which is to strictly interpret law and not to create law." Yet no less a kook than Judge Robert Bork himself acknowledged the difficulty of the task:
"Of course, nothing about interpreting the Constitution can be precise. We're dealing with words, we're dealing with principles, and you have to discuss how far the principle reaches, how far it doesn't reach. It's not a mathematical exercise. It's a question of judgment."
--Robert Bork (July 16, 2003, during an interview conducted at Uncommon Knowledge)
In fact, he makes the task sound downright messy, in his famous 'inkblot'
analogy:
I do not think that you can use the Ninth Amendment unless you know something of what it means. For example, if you had an amendment that says "Congress shall make no" and then there is an ink blot and you cannot read the rest of it and that is the only copy you have, I do not think the court can make up what might be under the ink blot.
--Robert Bork, during Senate Confirmation Hearings on his nomination to the Supreme Court
So, I find it utterly ironic that "strict constructionists" want to clean up the mess simply by smearing the inkblot all over the entire Constitution. The following comes from an interview with Judge Bork by Peter Robinson, at Uncommon Knowledge; they are speaking of the Ninth Amendment and Griswold v. Connecticut:
Peter Robinson: ...when this comes out, if this case [Griswold v. Connecticut] is decided in 1965, if I remember your career correctly, you were teaching at Yale at the time. Did you spot that this was trouble right away?
Judge Bork: Oh yeah.
Peter Robinson: That is to say...
Judge Bork: Well no wait, I take it back. I once tended to believe you could make something like that. And...
Peter Robinson: You could create a privacy right of some kind?
Judge Bork: Well, not privacy. It really is an autonomy right. I mean if you take the Bill of Rights, every one of them is about a personal freedom. So if you want to generalize that, you have a right of general freedom, general autonomy. Well, of course, you can't have that, that's anarchy.
(Emphasis is mine). Right. Liberty is anarchy. I'm glad he said it so clearly. It should be a lot harder for him and those like him to deny what we've all known for quite some time now -- conservatives are cowards who are afraid of freedom itself.
Prior Self-Restraints:
And finally, speaking of cowardice, I find it utterly ironic that the New York Times should run so rabbit-scared of the White House that it withheld the story on King George's illegal domestic spying for a year or more (and helped to sway the election, to boot). After all, when the Times and WaPo took on Nixon's White House and Justice Department for the right to publish the classified Pentagon Papers, they not only won their case, but got this spirited assurance of the role of the press:
In the First Amendment the Founding Fathers gave the free press the protection it must have to fulfill its essential role in our democracy. The press was to serve the governed, not the governors. The Government's power to censor the press was abolished so that the press would remain forever free to censure the Government. The press was protected so that it could bare the secrets of government and inform the people. Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell. In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. In revealing the workings of government that led to the Vietnam war, the newspapers nobly did precisely that which the Founders hoped and trusted they would do.
My God. What more do you want, Times ... egg in your beer? If you don't have the tubes to file a story after getting this kind of go-ahead, then you really should just fold up and get out of the business.