Jewish Atheist

Until the BP oil spill is stopped, every entry will have the following preface:

America’s thirst for oil has created a disaster. Before the spill is stopped, the entire Gulf of Mexico could be ecologically exterminated. I hope I am wrong. But until this disaster is fixed, I hereby call for an immediate moratorium on the recreational use of fossil fuels. A million race cars, boats, Cessnas, jetskis, and other gas-guzzling gadgets will be silent, starting today. To continue to burn fossil fuels for our amusement while the costs of getting it are so disastrously obvious is unconscionable.

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“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Mark Twain

Today hearings begin on a Supreme Court nominee who has not logged even an hour in Traffic Court.

When I first heard that she had no experience on the bench, I thought they were exaggerating: surely she had a little.

No experience!!

Then I found out the truth. She has none. This could be a plus, as I’ll explain. But on the face of it, it is identity politics run wild.

I guess if a lunatic narcissist like Palin could gain a following (no white guy stirs people’s primitive political passions as she does), then competence is completely disconnected from genetics and gender, and the proposition is reduced to an absurdity that I thought would only exist in jokes, e.g., “Yeah, and someday a liberal President will nominate somebody to the Supremes who has NO experience on the bench” (all laugh).

And now the Establishment goes through the confirmation game, for someone who shouldn’t even be there. What a slap in the face to all the male and female jurists who have worked so hard to hone their courtroom skills: Experience, shmexperience. If it’s the right color and/or gender, go for it.

Shamed and humiliated

If I were one of those judges, I would feel shamed and humiliated. Your hard-won experience counts for nothing. ANYBODY with the right genes (or connections) is in. We won’t even pretend that competence and experience count.

Would you want somebody operating on your brain or filling your teeth or fixing your car who had no actual experience? Didn’t think so. So why appoint someone with no – I still can’t believe it – no experience in this most important of tasks: preserving and defending the Constitution, which supposedly limits the power of government – to tax, spend, start wars, and do much else that affects our lives?

Money and blood

We’re talking money and blood here, lots of it. A writer to today’s Chicago Tribune laments the fact that the military/industrial complex has kept the country at war for most of his life.

The first thing that should happen is that she should be dismissed in the first five minutes and the President strongly asked to come up with someone qualified. But of course they won’t do that. They’re now in the delusional state in which all is possible in the name of diversity. No one will ask the obvious question; she’ll probably be confirmed.

Could be good.

But wait – maybe this is a good thing. Maybe Obama has a stealth strategy for deliberately packing the Court with people who don’t know jack shit about the long history of constitutional law and are thus well qualified to apply the Constitution to real 21st century life.

Maybe he wants them to abandon that part of Constitutional law which is mostly spin in favor of bigger government (notably the “commerce” and “general welfare” clauses). Maybe he just wants them to be able to understand the Constitution and interpret it in a commonsense way.

I recall William F. Buckley’s (I think) comment that he would rather be governed by the first 550 people in the New York phonebook than the preening idiots we have governing us now.

So if Obama wants a Supreme Court that’s qualified, he should know, as a Constitutional law prof, how often and how skillfully the document has deliberately been misinterpreted to justify bigger government. He should know that a Court of intelligent laypeople will do a much better job than an experienced jurist who knows all the Court precedents and has bought into the rationale for enlarging government way beyond its Constitutional limits.

No dummies

We don’t want dummies. I can easily imagine a testing/qualification system from which names would be drawn. Americans interested in serving on the Court would sit for the US-CAT (”us-cat,” as in “US Constitutional Aptitude Test”). The test would evaluate their understanding of the Constitution and their ability to apply its principles and provisions.

All potential nominees should be required to understand the Tenth Amendment, a masterpiece of thought and compact syntax.

Most of the document isn’t hard to understand (if you’re smarter than a 5th grader), but applying it to new circumstances can be challenging.

Right to bear arms

Even I don’t know where to come down on the 2nd Amendment, and I’ve thought long and hard about it. As a former student of Latin, I recognize the first half – about the necessity of a militia – as an English rendering of the Latin ablative absolute (everybody knew Latin back then), equivalent to “by virtue of this being the case.” There’s debate about what constitutes a “militia.” And of course we have weapons the Founders couldn’t even imagine.

Yet guns prevent crimes and abort school shootings. Supreme Court nominees should be able to talk and write intelligently on this. Don’t people have the right to protect themselves?

I’m setting the bar pretty high for these citizen-Justices: read, understand, and defend the Constitution. Most Americans don’t know what’s in the Bill of Rights. Some even disapprove of individual Amendments. Too much freedom.

Right place, right time

I hope Justice-elect Kagan appreciates how, like Palin plucked from deserved obscurity, she’s in the right place at the right time. That she has not shown the humility to recuse herself on Day One implies an arrogance and/or an ignorance that I don’t want to see in a Supreme Court justice.

I vote no.