If you believe in a "living constitution" your controversial on one side, if you do not then you are controversial on the other.
How do we know what judges "believe"? You've got some guy sitting on some bench somewhere hearing cases day after day, making decisions day after day, doing his job and doing it well. How do we know what he "believes"? We could ask his clerk, I guess, who has seen enough of his cases to detect patterns. Or we could ask him. We could find out if we investigated.
My thinking is that, if we know too easily what he "believes," his qualifications for a job on the federal bench are diminished. If he trumpets what he "believes," that's a disqualifier for a judge. The best judges do what they do quietly. If he's so strident in his beliefs or so flamboyant or full of himself that it's public knowledge what he "believes," I don't think he has the temperament to be a federal judge and I don't want him nominated or approved.
If there is to be an evolution to reshare the judiciary it has to start somehwere.
If you stack the process with nominees who conspicuously "believe" in "restoring the constitution," then you're going for revolution, not evolution. If you constrain your selections to Republicans with no history of judicial activism, then you nudge the judiciary in the direction you want it to go.
I suspect that what some folks want, though, is reactionary activists to counter the progressive activists and all out war. I can understand that. I just don't think they should be trying to pass themselves off as conservatives and I don't think you and I should be supporting them. |
