The case against Janice Rogers Brown boils down to the fact she is too hostile to government. So says Sen. Diane Feinstein.
As evidence of this hostility, we are provided statements like the following:
Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is families under siege, war in the streets, unapologetic expropriation of property, the precipitous decline of the rule of law, the rapid rise of corruption, the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.
California’s senior senator, who read this to the Senate Judiciary Committee, called Brown’s judicial opinions too “stark and filled with hyperbole” to allow her to move up to the appeals court. To Democrats like Feinstein, Brown is “out of the mainstream,” a phrase that seems to be replacing “mean-spirited” as the party shibboleth.
This invocation of the mainstream is mightily amusing in light of the fact that for decades Democrats have patched together electoral majorities by making promises to voting blocs that navigate the eddies and backwaters of American society.
But let us examine some other quotes from the appeals-court nominee, and see how far out they are. All of the following are drawn from her 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, “A Whiter Shade of Pale: Sense and Nonsense – The Pursuit of Perfection in Law and Politics”:
- “Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate. The drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens. It is my thesis today that the sheer tenacity of the collectivist impulse – whether you call it socialism or communism or altruism – has changed not only the meaning of our words, but the meaning of the Constitution, and the character of our people …”
- “Government is the only enterprise in the world which expands in size when its failures increase …”
- “The great innovation of this millennium was equality before the law. The greatest fiasco – the attempt to guarantee equal outcomes for all people …”
- “Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism’s virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental and profound flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice – including our freedom …”
- “In the New Deal-Great Society era, a rule that was the polar opposite of the classical era of American law reigned. A judicial subjectivity whose very purpose was to do away with objective gauges of constitutionality, with universal principles, the better to give the judicial priesthood a free hand to remake the Constitution …”
- “It … became government’s job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism. The words of Judge Alex Kozinski, written in 1991, are not very encouraging.” ‘What we have learned from the experience of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union … is that you need capitalism to make socialism work.’ In other words, capitalism must produce what socialism is to distribute.”
All this certainly is outside the mainstream of Democratic Party thinking, just as it is outside the mainstream of Republican Party action. But these statements are evidence of a keen, analytical mind and a widely read intellectualism. They also evidence a deep understanding and appreciation of American history.
In Feinstein’s remarks there is an echo of one of the great lies of William Jefferson Clinton, who said, “Government is your friend.”
Government is not supposed to be our friend – in the United States of America, it is supposed to be our servant. Friendship implies an equality that never was intended, and a trust that never should be granted.
If Sen. Feinstein finds Janice Rogers Brown’s anti-government views disqualify her as a nominee for the appeals-court bench, she also would have had to disqualify the framers of the Constitution. To them, government never was more than a necessary evil. Far from being a friend, it was an entity to be feared.
We’d all be better off if this “anti-government” concept had not been driven from the mainstream by politicians like Sen. Feinstein.
