
 |
|
Nov. 6, 2009
JWisdom.com Zero to 1/60th: How
to Empower An Hour with Gavriel Aryeh Sande (7 minutes)
Nov. 5, 2009
JWisdom.com Hidden Hints: Unlocking
Faith & Prayer with Rabbi Jay Yaacov Schwartz (10 minutes)
Nov. 4, 2009
JWisdom.com When God played peacemaker
With Rabbi Sroy Levitansky (5 minutes)
Nov. 3, 2009
JWisdom.com Are you are closet idolater?
With Sara Yoheved Rigler (10 minutes)
Nov. 2, 2009
JWisdom.com Abraham's Strange Change
With Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer (5 minutes)
Oct. 30, 2009
Oct. 29, 2009
JWisdom.com We Must Revamp our
Religious Vocabulary With Gavriel Aryeh Sanders ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 28, 2009
JWisdom.com Why what we wear
impacts who we are
With Rabbis Mordechai Becher, Menachem Golberger and Aliza Bulow ( 10 minutes)
Oct. 27, 2009
Paul Greenberg: The United Nations Is Outraged Again, Or: Department of Mideast Static
JWisdom.com The Science of Love
With Rabbi Jonathan Rietti ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 26, 2009
JWisdom.com Wisdom and Wonks
With Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 23, 2009
JWisdom.com Watermark and oneness
with Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 4 minutes)
Caroline B. Glick Stop using limited powers in a way that expands our enemies' advantages over us
Oct. 22, 2009
JWisdom.com No More More Family Fights --- Really?
By Sarah Chana Radcliffe ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 21, 2009
Tonya Alanez: Holocaust denier sues survivor, calling Auschwitz memoir 'vicious lies'
JWisdom.com Meditating Jewishly: A
Panacea for Success by Sarah Yoheved Rigler ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 20, 2009
Dennis Prager: Obama and Dalai Lama: Why Israel Worries about U.S. President
JWisdom.com Abraham was not religious
By Rabbi Yitzchok Fingerer ( 6 minutes)
Oct. 19, 2009
JWisdom.comWhy Good People Do Bad Things
By Rabbi Eytan Feiner ( 7 minutes)
Oct. 16, 2009
JWisdom.com Hearing Voices
By Rabbi Sroy Levitansky ( 5 minutes)
Oct. 15, 2009
JWisdom.com: Former MTV producer and stand-up comedian Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff: Taming a Control Freak (A VERY fast 15 minutes)
|
| |
Jewish World Review
June 27, 2008
/ 24 Sivan 5768
The Republic of Kennedy
By
Mona Charen
| 
|
|
|
|
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
In the United States today we no longer enjoy the rule of law but instead the rule of lawyers robed lawyers with the exalted title "justice" but still unelected lawyers enacting their own policy preferences.
Before their commonsense decision in the Second Amendment case, a different complement of justices (Justice Anthony Kennedy siding with the liberals) demonstrated what a flimsy hold the words of the Constitution have on our jurisprudence. In fact, when you consider that the court is pretty well divided between four liberals and four conservatives with Justice Kennedy swinging from one side to another as the spirit moves him, we now enjoy a Republic of Kennedy. All this fuss and bother about the presidential race is misplaced. The most powerful man in the land is someone most Americans couldn't pick out of a lineup.
In Louisiana v. Kennedy, the majority held unconstitutional a statute that permitted the death penalty for rape of a child under the age of 12. In the case at bar, the child was an 8-year-old girl who was brutally raped by her stepfather. After feeding her a cocktail of drugs dissolved in a glass of orange juice, the defendant attacked the girl so brutally that, as the decision records: "An expert in pediatric forensic medicine testified that L.H.'s injuries were the most severe he had seen from a sexual assault ... A laceration to the left wall of the vagina had separated her cervix from the back of her vagina, causing her rectum to protrude into the vaginal structure. Her entire perineum was torn from the posterior fourchette to the anus. The injuries required emergency surgery."
Explaining why the statute violated the constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual" punishment, Justice Kennedy declared that, "Evolving standards of decency must embrace and express respect for the dignity of the person, and the punishment of criminals must conform to that rule." Will someone please ask Justice Kennedy and his liberal fellows this question: If it's all a matter of "evolving standards," then why pretend to abide by a written document at all? And whose evolving standards?
As Justice Samuel Alito establishes in a devastating dissent, Kennedy distorts the historical record to bolster his claim that the U.S. is moving toward a "national consensus" against capital punishment in such cases. In point of fact, the opposite is more nearly the case, but the Court's own previous rulings have prevented the people from fully enacting their policy preferences. "When the law punishes by death," Kennedy wrote, "it risks its own sudden descent into brutality, transgressing the constitutional commitment to decency and restraint." So that's it. Preacher Kennedy is not comfortable. And, as Alito notes, "Although the Court has much to say on this issue, most of the Court's discussion is not pertinent to the Eighth Amendment question at hand."
Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, by contrast, is all about guess what the intent of the Founders. The distraction of the "militia" clause in debates over the Amendment's meaning is now eliminated. Through exhaustive historical examples, ranging from the Glorious Revolution in England to recent precedents, the majority opinion shows that the introductory clause referring to militias does not limit nor vitiate the "right of the people to keep and bear arms."
When the First, Fourth and Ninth Amendments speak of "the right of the people" to free speech and to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures and so on, no one interprets these as collective rather than individual rights. Nor is it consistent with history or logic to argue that "keep and bear arms" referred only to military uses. The founding generation did fear that the federal government might attempt to tyrannize them by confiscating their weapons and thereby disabling their militias. But that was not the only reason they sought to codify the right to bear arms. They saw themselves as vindicating a pre-existing right, a right "inherited from our English ancestors" as the Supreme Court put it in 1897.
As the Court was careful to clarify, the existence of an individual right to keep and bear arms does not mean that the right is absolute. Time, place, and manner restrictions have always been recognized even with respect to sacred First Amendment rights. But the hurdle states will have to clear in order to regulate gun ownership by law-abiding citizens just got inestimably higher. This is good for the nation as a whole (just pick up "More Guns, Less Crime" by John R. Lott if you doubt it), but all of it is due to one vote on the court in the Republic of Kennedy. Remember that in November.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
Comment on JWR contributor Mona Charen's column by clicking here.
Mona Charen Archives
© 2006, Creators Syndicate
|
|

Arnold Ahlert
Mitch Albom
Michael Barone
Dave Barry
Tony Blankley
Andy Borowitz
David Broder
Stratfor Briefing
Mona Charen
Linda Chavez
Ann Coulter
Greg Crosby
Larry Elder
Suzanne Fields
John Fund
Frank J. Gaffney
Lloyd Garver
Jonah Goldberg
Julia Gorin
Jonathan Gurwitz
Paul Greenberg
Lewis Grossberger
Victor Davis Hanson
Betsy Hart
Nat Hentoff
David Horowitz
Laura Ingraham
Cheri Jacobus Jeff Jacoby
Paul Johnson
Jack Kelly
Ed Koch
Ch. Krauthammer
Michael Ledeen
John Leo
David Limbaugh
Kathryn Lopez
Rich Lowry
Michelle Malkin
Jackie Mason
Dick Morris
Bill O'Reilly
Jim Mullen
Clarence Page
Kathleen Parker
Dennis Prager
Wesley Pruden
Tom Purcell
Jonathan Rauch
Celia Rivenbark
Robert Robb
Cokie & Steve Roberts
Pat Sajak
Debra J. Saunders
Culture Shlock
Roger Simon
Michael Smerconish
Thomas Sowell
Mark Steyn
John Stossel
Cal Thomas
Bob Tyrrell
Diana West
Dave Weinbaum
George Will
Walter Williams
Byron York
Mort Zuckerman

Robert Arial
Chuck Asay
Baloo
Chip Bok
Dry Bones
Lisa Benson
John Branch
Gary Brookins
John Cole
J. D. Crowe
John Deering
Brian Duffy
Everything's Relative
Mallard Fillmore
Jake Fuller
Bob Gorrel
Joe Heller
David Hitch
Jerry Holber
Steve Kelley
Jeff Koterba
Dick Locher
Chan Lowe
Ranan R. Lurie
Jimmy Margulies
Rick McKee
Michael Ramirez
Kevin Siers
Jeff Stahler
Ed Stein
Danna Summers
John Trever
Gary Varvel
Kirk Walters

How 2
Lori Borgman
The Savvy Consumer
Elder matters
Fixit
Dr. Peter Gott
GET A JOB! by Marty Nemko
Richard Lederer
Tech Maven
Every Monday Matters
Nutrition Myths
Bookmark These
Bruce Williams
How Stuff Works
|