Almost two-thirds of voters respond negatively when asked what they would think of a candidate who voted against "strengthening the prosecution of violent hate crimes motivated by prejudice against race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation."
A thousand points of pressure are being applied to the Scouts to yield to the emerging social consensus.
Here’s what Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., said in 1995 about group preferences and affirmative action:
After slamming big tobacco with an unprecedented $145 billion in punitive damages in a class action brought on behalf of sick smokers in Florida, jurors said their goal had been to punish the industry for its sins and "send a strong message for all companies in America that they can’t fraudulently represent anything to the public," in the words of the foreman, Leighton Finegan. He added: "For the past 50 years these companies have lied, hidden information, and burned documents, and that makes me angry."
"A democratic vote by nine lawyers."
That was one of Justice Antonin Scalia’s angry dissenting flourishes last month. He was talking about the Supreme Court’s decision on "the pure policy question" of whether the procedure that opponents call "partial-birth" abortion should be banned-as hundreds of elected officials in 31 states had tried to do until five Justices swept their laws aside. In another case, Scalia likened the Court to "some sort of nine-headed Caesar."
Dear me, must the man quarrel so? Can’t he see that most of us find "strict constructionists" boring and semantical contortionists rather appealing, at least when they come down on our side?
But to give Scalia his due, that time of year has come when some of us who like many of the laws made by the Justices pause to wonder how their brand of judicial review squares with the Constitution’s guarantee of a "republican form of government," which once meant leaving most of the lawmaking to elected officials.
Were I a lawgiver, I might issue decrees similar to the Court’s on school prayer, affirmative action preferences, Miranda rights, abortion rights, pornographers’ rights, nude dancers’ rights, gay rights, parents’ (vs. grandparents’) rights, HMOs’ rights, patients’ rights, and states’ rights. The majority does sometimes veer too far to the left, or to the right, for my taste, as in the 5-4 ruling on June 28 that women have a virtually absolute right to abort even what Scalia calls "a live-and-kicking child that is almost entirely out of the womb." And in the line of 5-4 decisions exempting states from federal regulatory laws such as the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. But usually the Court seems fairly sensible. It’s not such a bad superlegislature, on the whole.
It may now be unconstitutional for a public school teacher or student leader to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in class. Or at a football game. Or at a graduation. Or to recite the Declaration of Independence. Or to sing the national anthem.
On July 2, when Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, said on NBC’s Meet the Press that the current Supreme Court is "centrist-left," many a Washington journalist (among others) sniggered. Hadn’t Hatch read the papers or watched any televised news within the past few days-or the past 25 years? Did he miss the recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, which called the Court "unblushingly conservative"?
My column of June 24, embarrassingly headlined "Why We Should All Be Grateful to Janet Reno," seems to have been overtaken by events. It commended the Attorney General for having twice (in late 1997 and again in late 1998) spurned subordinates’ advice that she unleash an outside investigator on Vice President Al Gore. Hours after it went to press, the news broke that yet another subordinate had recently done the same. Oops.
As the leakage of internal Justice Department documents has swollen to a flood, Attorney General Janet Reno has been weathering a new round of attacks for "protecting" Vice President Al Gore and President Clinton by repeatedly refusing to trigger judicial appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the two men’s roles in various campaign finance abuses of 1996.
Imagine yourself a hard-working, law-abiding, young black man in any big city in America. You hail cabs, and they speed by as though you were invisible, only to pick up a white person down the block. You call to order a pizza, only to have the delivery driver refuse to come to your door or never show up at all. You go out to buy yourself a pizza, only to get pulled over for "driving while black" or stopped and frisked for walking while black. Such outrages are a constant theme of your daily life.
