Cowboy Confessional

You can almost feel Internet cables connected to constitutional law clusters buzzing.

Justice Souter has barely announced his retirement and already the pundits, politicos and prognosticators have leapt to the keyboards, predicting how the judicial bull chips will fall. Activist on the right predict Obama will nominate a hard leftist who views the Constitution as a minor impediment to centralized power. Left-of-center court watchers believe the same thing and actively pray for it.

Some say it won’t make a difference because such a candidate would merely replace one steaming bowl of fetid judicial excrement with another.

I’ll admit I don’t have a complete accounting of Justice Souter’s misdeeds, but two rulings acknowledge that his respect for the express written will of the American people lies somewhere below his feet. America’s list of enumerated rights includes those that The People held holy and denied government the authority to restrict. Yet in two glaring instances Souter sought to redefine the clear and well documented intent of The People, wresting away from individuals the means of self determination and giving unto the government the power to control the masses.

Souter joined the bare majority opinion in Kelo v. City of New London. This case granted government the power to take away a person’s property and give it to another entity, in this case a corporation. The People in their Fifth Amendment said unto the government “nor shall private property be taken for public use.” Souter and his sidekicks went on at length about the disjointed and immaterial concept of “public purpose” and how an allegedly benign and benevolent government should have the power to redistribute real estate for the calculated social improvement of a region.

In other words take away your home and give it to a corporation that promises to pay more taxes than you do.

Last year Souter was on the losing side of a decision, arguing in the Heller case that the phrase “the right of The People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” meant that the right should be infringed. As with the Kelo case, arguments against clearly stated and individually reserved rights were suffocated in the type of language only lawyers can utter with straight faces.

Though Souter silently dissented in these cases, his vote counted and showed a predilection for power and not for the privileges and immunities of individuals (i.e., you). Obama could nominate Mussolini’s ghost to replace Souter and the vote tally on individual rights cases would unlikely be altered. The only open question is if outvoted Senate Republican’s will bother uttering the phrase “strict constitutionalist” during confirmation hearings or perceive it to be an utter waste of breath.

Perhaps they simply will avoid inhaling the aroma from the new steaming bowl of fetid judicial excrement.

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