Dear Pat Buchanan: In response to your column “Our judicial dictatorship”:
You write: “Do the states have the right to outlaw same-sex marriage?
“Not long ago the question would have been seen as absurd. For every state regarded homosexual acts as crimes.”
No, states do not have that right. In fact, states don’t have rights at all. Individuals have rights; governments have authorities.
“But today rogue judges and justices, appointed for life, answerable to no one, instruct a once-democratic republic on what laws we may and may not enact.”
Yeah, like they’ve been doing for more than 200 years now. Like the Constitution gives them the authority to do. You remember the Constitution, right? It’s that document you claim to love so much but are highly ignorant of.
“Jefferson said that to cede such authority to the Supreme Court ‘would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.’ Was he not right? …
“Each branch of government, wrote Jefferson, is ‘independent of the others and has an equal right to decide for itself what is the meaning of the Constitution in the cases submitted to its action.'”
Jefferson was an opponent of judicial review. But remember, he wasn’t there for the writing of the Constitution, he was in France. The founders who did write the Constitution saw fit to give the Supreme Court the authority to negate laws that were passed democratically because they knew that pure majoritarianism would not protect the rights of the minority, as Hamilton wrote in Federalist 78.
“In 1954, the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of all public schools. But when the court began to dictate the racial balance of public schools, and order the forced busing of children based on race across cities and county lines to bring it about, a rebellion arose.
“Only when resistance became national and a violent reaction began did our black-robed radicals back down.”
Wait, what? Is that what happened? I seem to recall that mobs in the South committed that very “massive disobedience” in response to desegregation by blocking school entrances and keeping black children from going on, which required sending in the National Guard to prevent them from continuing to destroy the lives of those children. And guess what? Those people made the exact same argument that Buchanan is making, that “judicial dictators” were destroying their “freedom” to continue the discrimination that had gone on for so long.
“Ultimately, the failure is one of conservatism itself.
“Indeed, with neoconservatives in the van, the GOP hierarchy is today in headlong retreat on same-sex marriage. Its performance calls to mind the insight of that unreconstructed Confederate chaplain to Stonewall Jackson, Robert Lewis Dabney, on the failure of conservatives to halt the march of the egalitarians:
“‘American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. … Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom.'”
Yeah Pat, conservatives should just admit, as you’re willing to do, that they want to return to the pre-14th Amendment America, when equality was irrelevant as long as a majority of white people wanted it to be.
Sanford Sklansky
