Thursday, April 5, 2012

Oops

I commend the president and his staff for trying to walk back their rhetoric from his rather inane comments about the the propriety of judicial review.

Even though a judge on a panel of the 5th Circuit did chastised a federal attorney to seek clarification on the Department of Justice’s stance on the court’s prerogative to hold laws enacted by Congress, as well as any other political subdivision in the U.S., as being unconstitutional and therefore invalid.

However, it bothers me, that the goose is complaining about what the gander has been complaining about for many years … sorry, Charlie, but that sword cuts both ways, you know.

Yes, it distresses me that judges keep being identified as political as per the party of the president who appointed them, because as Chief Justice Earl Warren so aptly illustrated, just because a president appoints a person to the bench, that is no assurance that they toe a particular ideology or party line. Sorry, but federal judges, usually as a general rule, are more devoted to the law than to any particular stripe of political thought. Of course, then again, they are humans and do have their own principles to consider.

However, I would hope President Obama, his aides on his White House staff, as well as his supporters, would dial back their rhetoric attacking the legitimacy of the court and its rulings. It really is unhelpful to the state of political and civil dialogue in the United States.

1 comment:

Michael Raymond said...

I think we're just starting to enter the ratcheting up of rhetoric in this campaign season. Probably some of it will be coming from me.