Unfortunately, Justice Ginsburg’s death has come when her passing is not just a cause for private grief but also a political event.

Acton Institute ([link removed] )

News & Commentary

High Court, high stakes:

Replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg ([link removed] )

By Trey Dimsdale • September 23, 2020

RuthBaderGinsburg-2019-1030-GeorgetownLaw-AP_19303832537470-APPhotoSLASHJacquelynMartin-1100x733px ([link removed] )

It is extremely uncommon for me to read anything published by Glamour. In 2018, however, a first-person profile by Clara Spera ([link removed] ) caught my attention.

Spera, a Harvard-trained attorney, shared with readers a personal portrait of her grandmother, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ([link removed] ) . Over the course of the last several months as Justice Ginsburg’s health began to fade more rapidly, and then again last week when news of her death was announced, I remembered this article and the humane sincerity with which it was written. Justice Ginsburg, it seems, spent her life in service of others – to her family as a mother and grandmother, to her students as a law professor, to her principles as a public interest attorney, and to her nation as a long-tenured judge and justice.

Unfortunately, Justice Ginsburg’s death has come when her passing is not just a cause for private grief among her family and friends but also a political event. How much worse is the death of a matriarch when so many, both friend and foe, understand her passing only in instrumental terms. For some, she was part of dam holding back a decisive rightward shift on the Supreme Court; for others, her death presents an opportunity to see that shift materialize. It is no surprise, then, that the political war has already started. Democrats and Republicans are citing one another’s 2016 remarks in the wake of the death of Justice Scalia, and a mainstream media personality is calling for riots and destruction ([link removed] ) among his 300,000 Twitter followers if “they even try to replace” Ginsburg on the High Court.

The fact that a single judge is so strategically important to advancing one political agenda or another would be completely foreign to the Framers. In Federalist No. 78 ([link removed] ) , titled “The Judiciary Department,” Alexander Hamilton famously describes the courts as the “least dangerous branch.” The courts established by the Constitution, he argued, are weak. They have “no influence over either the sword or the purse.” Courts today, and over the course of Justice Ginsburg’s entire career, have been anything but weak. And the furor that erupts around the death or retirement of justices is only further proof of this.

One of the most important and controversial decisions in American constitutional law was the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison ([link removed] ) , in which the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Marshall established the doctrine of judicial review. This decision established a precedent that has shaped the operation of the courts up to the present day. According to Marbury, courts possess the constitutional authority to review the legislative acts of Congress. For the first few years after the case, the doctrine gathered dust. But by 2008, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in Boumediene v. Bush ([link removed] ) equated an absence of judicial review with an absence of legal constraint. The Supreme Court had become the most dominant, towering branch of government, asserting control over the acts of the legislative and executive branches.

But it has not just been the legacy of Marbury that expanded the power and influence of the judiciary to proportions simply unimagined by our Constitution. The Supreme Court has traditionally been bound in its ability to consider only legal questions rather than political ones; however, that distinction has become blurred, especially in cases in the last several decades. For all of its moral faults, Dred Scott v. Sanford ([link removed] ) has more than a few jurisprudential ones, too. Chief Justice Roger Taney attempted to place slavery beyond political debate by making legally unfounded assertions rather than legal arguments – ultimately plunging the nation into Civil War. Even though the decision has been roundly condemned for its holding, the legacy of the type of legal reasoning and jurisprudential concepts employed by the Court in Dred Scott in order to reach a certain political outcome have lived on.

After World War II, the Supreme Court entered into a frenetic period of reshaping American society through cases centering on individual rights. It was this era that gave rise judicial opinions relating to abortion, prayer in schools, birth control, the rights of those arrested and accused of crimes, the death penalty, search warrants, and many other things. It is not the case, however, that some of the issues were not ripe for judicial consideration. It is that the courts side-stepped constitutional restraints on the power of the judiciary in order to do so. Constitutionally, a federal court can only consider a “case or controversy” rather than a theoretical legal question. This requires an actual litigant whose relevant rights are at issue and grants them “standing.” The Warren and Burger Courts proved to be particularly adept at discovering standing in unexplored and dusty jurisprudential corners. Further, the Supreme Court has no constitutional power to legislate, but many of the era’s decisions contain complex enforcement schemes and judicially created remedies which bear striking resemblance to legislation in form, substance, and application.

The coming weeks are going to be brutal. The stakes are high, but they shouldn’t be. The Supreme Court was never designed to be as influential as it is, but it has become dangerous by detaching itself over the course of generations from its constitutional moorings. This contentious and fractured moment is the fruit of that drift.

Acton Line Podcast:

Will-to-power conservatism with Stephanie Slade ([link removed] )

September 23, 2020

20200923 ActonLine ([link removed] )

With fusionism – the strategic alliance of conservative foreign policy hawks, social conservatives and economic libertarians knitted together in the last half of the 20th century in opposition to international communism ­­– crumbling after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the modern conservative movement has been remaking itself in effort to address the problems of the current day.

One of these seemingly ascendant factions are the so-called common good conservatives.

In an article in the October 2020 edition of Reason magazine, managing editor Stephanie Slade examines the what she calls the “great liberalism schism” that has emerged out of the collapse of fusionism.

And for the common good conservatives shedding classical liberal norms, she identifies a new moniker: will-to-power conservativism, borrowing a concept from German philosopher Friederich Nietzsche.

In this episode, Stephanie Slade discusses will-to-power conservatism, who exactly has a claim on the concept of the common good, and what the great liberalism schism means for our politics and society.

Listen to the Episode
([link removed] )

You might also like

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, RIP ([link removed] )

By Rev. Ben Johnson • September 19, 2020

RuthBaderGinsburg-December2018-AP_20263008021117-1100x733px ([link removed] )

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away on the evening of Friday, September 18, 2020, at the age of 87. She died following her fifth bout with cancer, which had metastasized to her pancreas. She is preceded in death by her husband, Martin, and is survived by two children and four grandchildren. Ginsburg, the second woman appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, earned her reputation at its most fervent judicial activist during her 27 years on the court. At the same time, she became the jurist most lionized by cultural leaders, who quoted her cutting political dissents and dubbed her “The Notorious RBG.”

Read more
([link removed] )

Donald Trump, TikTok, and the social contract ([link removed] )

By Noah Gould • September 22, 2020

DonaldTrump-2020-0623-Address2YoungAmericaans-TurningPointAction-DreamCityChurch-Phoenix-GageSkidmore-CCBYSA2point0-1100x733px ([link removed] )

While TikTok will continue to be available in the U.S. due to a deal between ByteDance, Oracle, and Walmart, President Donald Trump has returned to his talking points about a payment from TikTok’s parent, ByteDance, to the U.S. Treasury. Most recently he said that ByteDance will “be making about a $5 billion contribution toward education.” While it is important to have a realistic policy towards China, forcing businesses to make special contributions in exchange for approving major deals would be harmful to our market system. Even more fundamentally, Trump’s demands reveal a mistaken understanding of who creates value in the economy.

Read more
([link removed] )

Facebook ([link removed] )

LinkedIn ([link removed] )

Twitter ([link removed] )

Instagram ([link removed] )

Acton Institute, 98 Fulton St E, Grand Rapids, MI 49503, United States, 616-454-3080

Unsubscribe ([link removed] )

Manage preferences ([link removed] )