The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [36]
The scope of presidential power during wartime. The ethics surrounding end-of-life decisions. These weren’t easy issues; as much as I disagreed with Republican policies, I believed they were worthy of serious debate. No, what troubled me was the process—or lack of process—by which the White House and its congressional allies disposed of opposing views; the sense that the rules of governing no longer applied, and that there were no fixed meanings or standards to which we could appeal. It was as if those in power had decided that habeas corpus and separation of powers were niceties that only got in the way, that they complicated what was obvious (the need to stop terrorists) or impeded what was right (the sanctity of life) and could therefore be disregarded, or at least bent to strong wills.
The irony, of course, was that such disregard of the rules and the manipulation of language to achieve a particular outcome were precisely what conservatives had long accused liberals of doing. It was one of the rationales behind Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America—the notion that the Democratic barons who then controlled the House of Representatives consistently abused the legislative process for their own gain. It was the basis for the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, the scorn heaped on the sad phrase “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” It was the basis of conservative broadsides against liberal academics, those high priests of political correctness, it was argued, who refused to acknowledge any eternal truths or hierarchies of knowledge and indoctrinated America’s youth with dangerous moral relativism.
And it was at the very heart of the conservative assault on the federal courts.
Gaining control of the courts generally and the Supreme Court in particular had become the holy grail for a generation of conservative activists—and not just, they insisted, because they viewed the courts as the last bastion of pro-abortion, pro-affirmative-action, pro-homosexual, pro-criminal, pro-regulation, anti-religious liberal elitism. According to these activists, liberal judges had placed themselves above the law, basing their opinions not on the Constitution but on their own whims and desired results, finding rights to abortion or sodomy that did not exist in the text, subverting the democratic process and perverting the Founding Fathers’ original intent. To return the courts to their proper role required the appointment of “strict constructionists” to the federal bench, men and women who understood the difference between interpreting and making law, men and women who would stick to the original meaning of the Founders’ words. Men and women who would follow the rules.
Those on the left saw the situation quite differently. With conservative Republicans making gains in the congressional and presidential elections, many liberals viewed the courts as the only thing standing in the way of a radical effort to roll back civil rights, women’s rights, civil liberties, environmental regulation, church/state separation, and the entire legacy of the New Deal. During the Bork nomination, advocacy groups and Democratic leaders organized their opposition with a sophistication that had never been seen for a judicial confirmation. When the nomination was defeated, conservatives realized that they would have to build their own grassroots army.
Since then, each side had claimed incremental advances (Scalia and Thomas for conservatives, Ginsburg and Breyer for liberals) and setbacks (for conservatives, the widely perceived drift toward the center