Pressuring Judges

Many years ago on road trips with my parents, I would see billboards along the highway reading “Save our Republic. Impeach Earl Warren.” They were put up by members of the John Birch Society who disliked some of the Warren court’s legal opinions and saw him as in league with or at least enabling communists in the United States. There was never any chance that Warren would be impeached, and it seems likely that many of the Birchers knew it. Probably the idea was to stir up hostility to the court and pressure it to take a different direction in its rulings.

This week Joe Biden announced proposals for term limits for justices on the supreme court. Since this would require a constitutional amendment, there is no chance that it will happen, and it is likely that even Biden knows it. Probably the idea is to stir up hostility to the court and pressure it to take a different direction in its rulings.

Making political threats against judges whose opinions one dislikes is a bad idea. There are good reasons the constitution established a judiciary independent of and equal to the legislative and executive branches of government. The Birchers were a bunch of cranks that few people took seriously. Biden is the president of the United States with many members of his party supporting his scheme. It is almost enough to make a person take the cynical view that Democrats and their public relations people in the traditional media might not be sincere in their bleating about saving democracy and preserving guardrails and restoring norms of political conduct, but only pretending for political advantage.

 

Defining "Woman"

 

The news last week included a statement under oath by a woman nominated to be a justice on the United States Supreme Court and selected because she was a woman, that she could not define the term “woman” because she was not a biologist. Besides perhaps committing a bit of mild perjury(since an intelligent person whose education went beyond high school probably would know the answer), Judge Jackson made a misstep by referring to biology. As a matter of biology, the answer is clear and well known. A woman is an adult human with two X chromosomes and female sex organs, i.e. the adult female of the species. To be true to the leftist fashions of the moment, she should have said she is not a gender studies professor, since those are the “scholars” relied on by the left to muddy the waters.

Of course there is more going on with this than facts of biology, and Judge Jackson may have to rule on controversies related to some of those things. A person has a right to dress like, behave as, and wish to be seen as a member of the opposite sex. It’s a free country, and a person can claim or pretend to be anything he wants—including a member of the opposite sex. There is no right to demand that anyone else believe or pretend to believe any of one’s opinions, heartfelt delusions included. Other people are free to reach their own conclusions, and attempts to coerce them are wrong. Someone should have asked Judge Jackson if she agrees with that. If anyone did, I missed it.

Kavanaugh and Ford

Brett Kavanaugh says he did not grope Mrs. Ford at a party when both were teenagers.  She says he did. The  one person she says was also there sides with Kavanaugh.  She says she cannot remember where or in which year the groping happened or how she arrived at the party or left it.  Her present version contradicts the story she told a therapist in regard to the number of people present at the groping and perhaps other things. She is a leftist opponent of Trump and the Republicans.  She found her two question lie detector test to be almost too emotionally stressful to handle. She was reported to have recently travelled to Hawaii but was reluctant to come to Washington because of a claimed fear of flying.  He produced a detailed calendar of his activities showing no such party, while she produced no evidence at all.  Another man has stated that he may have been the one who groped her when they are teenagers. While one can never know for sure, the preponderance of evidence supports the conclusion that Kavanaugh is probably telling the truth, and Ford is probably  lying and/or mixed up to the point of being delusional.

  Beyond that it is surely fair to ask why this accusation matters at all.  At most a horny teenager tried to cop a feel at a probably drunken high school party from a girl in a swimsuit and got rebuffed. There was no rape. No one was beaten or slapped.  No one’s clothes were removed.  One does not have to condone it to believe it would be irrelevant to a person’s  character or qualifications thirty or forty years later or to see the hypocrisy of Democrats who claim  to be scandalized by it but excuse their own likely actual abusers of women from Bill Clinton to Keith Ellison.  (The same thing was true about the dispute between Clarence Thomas and  Anita Hill. The sensible reaction to a charge that an adult man made a suggestive wisecrack or two to an adult woman is “who cares?”. )

One can write the awful behavior of the Democrats in the senate off as only typical political nonsense, but I am afraid that would be a mistake.  Things are getting rough, not 1850s or even 1930s rough, but rough enough to be very worrisome. That sort of thing can get out of hand.