July 3, 2022
A SCOTUS Guide for the Perplexed
By Clarice Feldman
As is usual, the Supreme Court saved its most important decisions for the end of this term, and the three biggies were handed down within days of each other: “Bruen (gun rights), Dobbs (abortion rights) and West Virginia (administrative regulation of CO2).”
You don’t have to be a constitutional law scholar to wade through all this and the footnotes, citations, and legal disputations. Francis Menton has done it for you:
(You can’t rely on the major media to do it. For the most part they share the same ideological viewpoint as that of the three dissenting justices, a view Menton explains very well.)
In a nutshell:
Vision 1. The Constitution allocates powers to the three branches of government, and also lists certain rights entitled to constitutional protection. The role of the courts is (1) to assure that the powers are exercised only by those to whom they are allocated, (2) to protect the enumerated rights, and (3) as to things claimed to be rights but not listed, to avoid getting involved.
Vision 2. The Constitution is an archaic document adopted more than 200 years ago, and largely obsolete. The role of the courts is to implement the current priorities of the academic left and then somehow rationalize how that is consistent with the written document. If a right is enumerated in the Constitution but disfavored by the current left (e.g., the right to “keep and bear arms”), then the courts should find a way to uphold enactments that minimize that right down to the point that it is a nullity. If a right is not enumerated in the Constitution, but is a priority of the left (e.g., abortion), then that right can be discovered in some vague and unspecific constitutional language (“due process”). And if the left has a priority to transform the economy and the way the people live, but the Congress does not have sufficient majorities to enact that priority, then the Executive agencies can implement that priority on their own authority, and the role of the courts is to assist the agencies in finding something in the tens of thousands of pages of federal statutes, however vague and dubious, that can be claimed to authorize the action.
These two views, he correctly observes, are irreconcilable.
more
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/07/a_scotus_guide_for_the_perplexed.html
