How to turn around the federal courts

We wouldn’t need to talk about the desperate expedient of impeaching federal judges, if we had leadership in this country. In 1895, future U.S. president and Chief Justice William Howard Taft, then a federal circuit court judge, wrote:

The opportunity freely and publicly to criticize judicial action is of vastly more importance to the body politic than the immunity of courts and judges from unjust aspersions and attack. Nothing tends more to render judges careful in their decisions and anxiously solicitous to do exact justice than the consciousness that every act of theirs is to be submitted to the intelligent scrutiny and candid criticism of their fellow men. In the case of judges having a life tenure [i.e. federal judges], indeed, their very independence makes the right freely to comment on their decisions of greater importance, because it is the only practicable and available instrument in the hands of a free people to keep such judges alive to the reasonable demands of those they serve.

What Taft says is so basic, so indispensable, and yet, in today’s world, it sounds like an ancient, forgotten tongue. Far from freely commenting on Supreme Court judges, our political establishment and the public treat them like near-royalty, bowing and scraping before them like courtiers. Look at the unctuousness that prevails at any public event at which Supreme Court justices, particularly the liberal justices, are invited as speakers. In our age of self-esteem and denial of objective standards, the more shameless the judges become in their transgression of the laws and Constitution, the more respect they get.

In an article posted at the Concerned Women for America website, Spencer Warren expands on Taft’s theme, arguing that what’s needed to turn around the judicial revolution is criticism of the courts by the president—and he means real criticism, criticism that will make the judges take notice, not the obligatory mouthings we hear from President Bush from time to time.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 11, 2005 04:48 PM | Send