I strive for conservative ideals, but I recognize we no longer live in a conservative society and that’s not going to change during any tenure you choose to grant me. What I will seek out is necessary compromise: policies which meet short-term political or social needs using the tools available but which embody the ideal of long-term cultural change to render those tools unnecessary.
Words matter. If the left succeeds in re-defining the very terms of debate to the point that it becomes difficult or impossible to describe the judicial behavior that is objectionable — if they usurp the term “judicial activism” (and how many others?) and replace its meaning with something less objectionable — then they win by default.
Anyone who has lived in a community with a large student population can tell you that they are admirably idealistic and will reflexively support any and all expensive or intrusive solutions to local problems that they judge to be of paramount concern. Unfortunately, their insulation from the community distorts their perspective on such judgments, and the fact that their relative poverty and short tenure means they will never live with the consequences of supporting such solutions, either monetarily or socially, blinds them to the tradeoffs involved.
In short, students learn their lessons about politics at the expense of the locals. They vote their ideals with no need to consider costs, free to congratulate themselves on their virtue and walk away from their mistakes when they graduate — while those left behind must live with the long-term consequences.
Recently the New York Times has taken to criticizing the newly ‘conservative’ U.S. Supreme Court for rulings that respect and enforce Constitutional limits on the authority of the Congress and of regulatory agencies and of lower courts and of individual citizens to extract money and penitence from “powerful” individuals and corporations for perceived misdeeds. […]
The complaint is not and has never been that judges are acting to enforce constitutional boundaries on the legislature; it is and has always been that they fail to act to enforce those boundaries — or act without constitutional warrant to make up new boundaries to enforce out of whole cloth — when reading the constitution rigorously would undermine some extralegal cause to which they have committed themselves. The complaint is not that judges act, but that they act in deference to some cause other than the rule of law that they have sworn to uphold.
In advocating for Microsoft to defy the Chinese government’s censorship orders and stand up for free expression in China you are demanding that an American corporation take it upon itself to disregard the local laws of the community in which they operate. You are demanding that they substitute an American standard of civil liberty and an American vision of proper social regulation for the locally determined political and cultural choices.
We routinely view the problem of illegal immigration effectively as one of importing labor. But it is a much more useful paradigm to view it as exporting work, despite the fact that the work doesn’t actually leave the country … If we view illegal immigration as an illicit export of jobs rather than as in illicit import of people, we see a different set of solutions to the problem.
Which way do you want it? Opportunity comes with risk; security impedes opportunity. If you want creditors to give people opportunity you can’t blame them for enabling risk-taking. If you want them to prevent risk-taking you can’t blame them for denying opportunity.
Given that the moral purpose of the death penalty is its symbolic import, we can formulate an alternative death penalty that both preserves that purpose and protects the innocent from unjust execution. The key is to separate the sentence of death from the implementation of that sentence. The imposition of a death sentence communicates our moral intent; the execution of the condemned merely closes the account.
In March of 2005 the Colorado Supreme Court voided the death sentence for a murderer on the basis of the fact that a juror during the penalty phase – when the decision of what sentence to impose was being debated – had copied down a verse from the book of Exodus and quoted it during […]