The Kabuki Dance now underway between Soon-To-Be Justice Alito and Senate Democrats makes me think of Shakespeare’s Henry V.
The Democrats (and pro-abortion Republicans like Arlen Specter) will be desperately trying to get Alito to forswear any overthrow of sacred SCOTUS “precedents” such as Roe v. Wade, while Alito will genuflect before the precedent shrine and mellifluously commit to nothing.
Both sides will assiduously avoid any discussion of how these precedents were established in the first place – by overthrowing previous ones – what justified their establishment, and what would justify replacing them with new ones today.
Instead, there will be monotonous droning on about the legal concept of stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by that which is decided”), and how it makes Roe v. Wade set in unquestionable stone.
But Alito knows his Shakespeare, and while mouthing his smoothly empty responses in the hearings conducted by his intellectual inferiors, he will be thinking of the famous love scene at the end of Henry V.
Henry has secured his overwhelming victory over the French at Agincourt (1), the French King and Queen, Charles VI and Isabel, have come to pay him obeisance, and brought with them their beautiful daughter, Katherine of Valois, to offer her hand to Henry in marriage.
Alone with Katherine and overcome by her beauty, he professes his love and tries to kiss her. She recoils. Surprised, Henry asks:
“It is not a fashion for the maids of France to kiss before they are married?”
She answers that, yes, it is a fashion of long standing.
“O, Kate,” Henry replies, “nice customs curtsey to great kings. Dear Kate, we cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouths of fault-finders.”
She succumbs to his logic, they kiss, and a new fashion for French maidens is born.
Lower court judges, such as those on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, upon which Sam Alito has sat for 15 years, are indeed bound by precedents established by the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court itself is not. Just as a majority of Justices were Constitutionally free to establish the Roe v. Wade (1973) precedent, so a majority is fully free to get rid of it.
With Alito, the Court will have four firmly pro-life Justices (Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts). There are four firmly pro-abortion Justices (Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer). The remaining Justice, Anthony Kennedy, is less maniacally pro-abortion than the latter four. He was instrumental in the ghastly pro-abortion Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), but dissented in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), which overturned laws against partial-birth abortion.
The pro-life intellectual firepower of the Pro-Life Four could broach Kennedy’s weak pro-abortion defenses and persuade him to come over from the Dark Side.
That’s a maybe. What’s a certainty is that one of the members of the Dark Side is 85 years old – John Paul Stevens. He’ll be 88 in 2008. Can he last that long? The odds are against it. That’s why the real “Armageddon” nomination battle won’t be over Alito, it will be over Stevens’ replacement.
For now, the Senate Democrats will huff and puff, the left-wing crazies like Ralph Neas, Kate Michelman, and those at MoveOn.org will spend millions demonizing Alito to no avail, Alito will be quickly confirmed, and we’ll have four Makers of Manners on the Supreme Court. Only one more to go.
(1). The Battle of Agincourt was fought on October 15 (St. Crispin's Day), 1415. Before the battle, Shakespeare has Henry deliver the immortal line, "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..." The French suffered 5,000 noblemen killed including 3 dukes, 5 counts, 90 barons, and another 1,000 taken prisoner. The English losses were 13 knights and 100 foot soldiers.
Source - http://www.tothepointnews.com/content/view/1992/44/
The Democrats (and pro-abortion Republicans like Arlen Specter) will be desperately trying to get Alito to forswear any overthrow of sacred SCOTUS “precedents” such as Roe v. Wade, while Alito will genuflect before the precedent shrine and mellifluously commit to nothing.
Both sides will assiduously avoid any discussion of how these precedents were established in the first place – by overthrowing previous ones – what justified their establishment, and what would justify replacing them with new ones today.
Instead, there will be monotonous droning on about the legal concept of stare decisis (Latin for “to stand by that which is decided”), and how it makes Roe v. Wade set in unquestionable stone.
But Alito knows his Shakespeare, and while mouthing his smoothly empty responses in the hearings conducted by his intellectual inferiors, he will be thinking of the famous love scene at the end of Henry V.
Henry has secured his overwhelming victory over the French at Agincourt (1), the French King and Queen, Charles VI and Isabel, have come to pay him obeisance, and brought with them their beautiful daughter, Katherine of Valois, to offer her hand to Henry in marriage.
Alone with Katherine and overcome by her beauty, he professes his love and tries to kiss her. She recoils. Surprised, Henry asks:
“It is not a fashion for the maids of France to kiss before they are married?”
She answers that, yes, it is a fashion of long standing.
“O, Kate,” Henry replies, “nice customs curtsey to great kings. Dear Kate, we cannot be confined within the weak list of a country’s fashion. We are the makers of manners, Kate, and the liberty that follows our places stops the mouths of fault-finders.”
She succumbs to his logic, they kiss, and a new fashion for French maidens is born.
Lower court judges, such as those on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, upon which Sam Alito has sat for 15 years, are indeed bound by precedents established by the Supreme Court. But the Supreme Court itself is not. Just as a majority of Justices were Constitutionally free to establish the Roe v. Wade (1973) precedent, so a majority is fully free to get rid of it.
With Alito, the Court will have four firmly pro-life Justices (Alito, Thomas, Scalia, and Roberts). There are four firmly pro-abortion Justices (Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer). The remaining Justice, Anthony Kennedy, is less maniacally pro-abortion than the latter four. He was instrumental in the ghastly pro-abortion Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), but dissented in Stenberg v. Carhart (2000), which overturned laws against partial-birth abortion.
The pro-life intellectual firepower of the Pro-Life Four could broach Kennedy’s weak pro-abortion defenses and persuade him to come over from the Dark Side.
That’s a maybe. What’s a certainty is that one of the members of the Dark Side is 85 years old – John Paul Stevens. He’ll be 88 in 2008. Can he last that long? The odds are against it. That’s why the real “Armageddon” nomination battle won’t be over Alito, it will be over Stevens’ replacement.
For now, the Senate Democrats will huff and puff, the left-wing crazies like Ralph Neas, Kate Michelman, and those at MoveOn.org will spend millions demonizing Alito to no avail, Alito will be quickly confirmed, and we’ll have four Makers of Manners on the Supreme Court. Only one more to go.
(1). The Battle of Agincourt was fought on October 15 (St. Crispin's Day), 1415. Before the battle, Shakespeare has Henry deliver the immortal line, "We few, we happy few, we band of brothers..." The French suffered 5,000 noblemen killed including 3 dukes, 5 counts, 90 barons, and another 1,000 taken prisoner. The English losses were 13 knights and 100 foot soldiers.
Source - http://www.tothepointnews.com/content/view/1992/44/
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