It is now pathological. The man is incapable of telling the truth. David Brooks lies in every column he writes. He brings to mind Mary McCarthy's famous remark concerning Lillian Hellman - "every word she writes is a lie - including 'and' and 'the.'"
Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. Why? Because the central thesis of virtually every David Brooks column is a lie.
Tomorrow's lie is this:
Every few years another civilizing custom is breached. Over the past four years Democrats have resorted to the filibuster again and again to prevent votes on judicial nominees they oppose. Up until now, minorities have generally not used the filibuster to defeat nominees that have majority support. They have allowed nominees to have an up or down vote. But this tradition has been washed away.
This is a bald faced fucking lie. And Brooks knows it. A deliberate lie. One of many. The fact is that the Senate never required the actual invocation of the filibuster very often precisely because Senators could stop a nomination, either secretly in committee, or before the nomination was brought to a vote. Brooks knows this. Fucking liar.
More on the flip.
Why does Brooks lie? Here's why:
Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.
He wants the right to choose stripped away from women. Read this bullshit:
When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.
Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.
Liar. Fucking liar. The Roe decision, while not well reasoned, is a natural and correct progression from the general acceptance of the right to privacy first proposed by the great Justice Louis Brandeis in dissent. Brandeis' views won the day over time. Griswold expanded privacy rights to the right to contraception. Roe was the proper and natural extension of this right, even though Blackmun wrote a pretty crappy opinion.
The right to choose of course extends to women's control of their bodies. There is a principled opposition to Roe - that a fetus has rights that outweigh the privacy rights of women. But the question remains a judicial and Constitutional one. This is not an example of judicial activism.
Why? Because a fetus is not, and never has been, under law, a person with cognizable rights. When people say "abortion is murder" they are expressing personal moral views. But the law has never said this. Even when abortions were illegal, it was not because abortions were deemed murder, rather that the Constitutional right to privacy, to choose, was not yet recognized by the Supreme Court.
The Roe Court did not reach out to decide this issue - a case was filed. Courts weighed the arguments. A decision was reached. The correct one in my opinion, both as policy AND as a question of Constitutional law.
Brooks proposes that the Court should have abdicated its duty. Understand what he is saying. The Supreme Court should NOT decide Constitutional questions properly presented before it. This idea is as dangerous, as illegitimate, as lawless, as the Schiavo travesty and all of Delay's shenanigans.
Brooks is an unscrupulous, lying, shameless shill. He disgusts me.