With bigots harassing and violently attacking loyal Arab-Americans, it is a bit taboo in some circles to advocate racial or ethnic profiling of any kind, in any place, ever. "I’m against using race as a profiling component," even in screening would-be airline passengers, Attorney General John Ashcroft declared in a September 16 television interview.
Last January, a month after the supreme court handed down its hugely controversial decision in Bush v. Gore–ending the month-old election stalemate and turning the White House over to George W. Bush–legal scholars across the country joined in protest. In a full-page ad in The New York Times, 554 law professors accused the high court of “acting as political proponents” for Bush, and “taking power from the voters.” Worse, the ad scolded, “the Supreme Court has tarnished its own legitimacy.”
That criticism has yet to subside. Some nine months into the Bush presidency, the debate over the ruling among legal scholars goes on. Many of the country’s most respected legal minds have weighed in on Bush v. Gore. The critics contend the court should never have taken the case in the first place. It was a matter of state law, and should be left to state courts, as is the tradition, they argue. The majority’s claim that the Florida State Supreme Court’s recount procedures violated the Constitution’s equal-protection clause is both novel and out of whack with conservative doctrine, they add. And they smirk at the justices’ suggestion that their legal analysis should not carry the power of precedent.
The attacks are framed in unusually unflattering terms. Here’s a sample. Yale Law School’s Bruce Ackerman: “A blatantly partisan act, without any legal basis whatsoever.” Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz: “The single most corrupt decision in Supreme Court history.” American University’s Jamin Raskin: “Bandits in black robes.”
Unimaginable as it may seem, it could be worse the next time. It could be nuclear or biological terror. While we mourn our loved ones, friends, neighbors, and countrymen, we must focus on the fact that these evil people will kill as many of us as they can-unless we stop them or kill them first.
The way it’s typically portrayed in the media, campaign finance reform is a push to stop big companies and other wealthy interests from buying influence by funneling huge "soft-money" contributions to federal candidates through their political parties. And, oh yes, there’s something in there about barring the use of corporate and union money to sway elections through "sham issue ads." And something about more disclosure of election-related spending.
If you want an inkling of what the McCain-Kennedy-Edwards "patients’ bill of rights" would do, consider the cases of some plaintiffs who have already found ways around the federal law shield-which the bill would dismantle-that now protects managed care plans from liability for most coverage decisions.
The left-liberal reflex reaction to Bush vs. Gore will not be challenged widely in the academy, though the decision is no more vulnerable to criticism than many of the cases that liberals cherish…. Surrounded by the like-minded, browsing comfortably in a herd, implicitly defining a narrow channel of left liberalism as the mainstream, many professors of constitutional law have become dogmatically complacent. Their conversational community is an echo chamber. They utter as truisms what a detached observer would recognize as prejudices.
The federal government’s first execution in 38 years comes at a time when DNA and other evidence has exonerated enough death row inmates to shake public confidence in the system.
Timothy McVeigh–an unrepentant, confessed mass murderer whose guilt was utterly clear–deserved the death penalty if anyone ever did, and an overwhelming majority of Americans favored his execution. But according to a recent Gallup poll, support for capital punishment as an institution has slipped from a peak of 80 percent in 1994 to 65 percent this year, in part, no doubt, because falling crime rates have eased public fears. When pollsters specify life imprisonment without parole as the alternative, support for the death penalty drops to 52 percent. Most respondents do not believe that the death penalty deters murders-which is “the only reason to be for it,” President Bush said last year. “I don’t think you should support the death penalty to seek revenge,” he added.
Bush’s comments may have dismayed those whose convictions call for executing the worst killers “in order to pay them back,” in the words of Walter Berns, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Meanwhile, equally resolved are religious objectors and others whose morality rejects all executions as immoral and “uniquely degrading to human dignity,” in the words of the late Justice William J. Brennan, Jr.
It started right after the election. The indispensable Jesse Jackson muttered about "a pattern of irregularities and intimidation" in Florida in which "African-American voters were substantially targeted." By December 8, he was claiming that the Bush brothers had "stolen" the election by "schemes of disenfranchisement." Other "leaders" were not far behind. "Police checkpoints were set up in and around polling places to intimidate black men," imagined NAACP Chairman Kweisi Mfume, adding, "it was all part of some grand conspiracy" to keep blacks from the polls. "There was a systematic disenfranchisement of people of color and poor people," hallucinated Donna Brazile, Al Gore’s campaign manager. Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and others put up police roadblocks to stop blacks from voting and "tampered with the results in Florida," oozed Democratic National Committee Chairman (and Clinton moneyman) Terry McAuliffe.
Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, some current professional golfers, the PGA, and Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins say that walking a golf course, and thus conquering fatigue, is an essential part of PGA Tour competition. Disabled golfer Casey Martin, many other pros, and New York Times sportswriter Dave Anderson say otherwise.
Timothy McVeigh is the ideal poster boy for the death penalty, it is often said. He is an unmistakably guilty, unrepentant, rational, calculating, confessed mass murderer who can complain neither of racism (he’s white) nor of an unfair trial (he had good lawyers). If anyone ever deserved execution, he does. Even leading anti-death-penalty scholar Hugo Adam Bedau has said: "I’ll let the criminal justice system execute all the McVeighs they can capture, provided they’d sentence to prison all the people who are not like McVeigh."
