Posted on February
29, 2016
Let Us Litmus
Judicial nominees must be held to
standards
by
Daniel
Clark
To the dismay of conservatives everywhere, President
Obama will appoint a successor to the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin
Scalia. Just as surely, there will be
calls from the Democrats and therefore from the news media that Republican
senators refrain from applying a “litmus test” to the nominee. It’s an absurd expectation, with which the Jellyphants of the GOP often absurdly comply.
You
might remember conducting a litmus test in middle school science class, by
applying a substance to a piece of litmus paper, and discovering from the color
of the paper whether that substance was an acid or a base. What is called a litmus test regarding
judicial nominees is a similar exercise, in which a judge’s philosophy is
applied to one of various touchstone issues, in order to determine whether that
judge is qualified to be entrusted with interpreting the Constitution. Isn’t that exactly what the senators should
be doing?
“Litmus test” is just another term for a standard, and
anyone who opposes the application of standards to Supreme Court nominees is
either a nincompoop or a scoundrel.
Confirmation of the wrong nominee would threaten to deprive us of our
most fundamental constitutional rights.
After decades of treating liberal judges with all the scrutiny that one
might give an applicant to culinary school, the Jellyphants
now profess to appreciate the gravity of their situation. If that’s true, they should be willing to
establish the following series of litmus tests, in advance of Obama’s
appointment.
* If you claim that a right to abortion exists
anywhere in the Constitution, you are already making things up to advance your
own policy preferences, and therefore must be rejected.
* If you fail to
recognize “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be
infringed” as an independent clause, but instead think that right is contingent
upon one’s belonging to a militia, you do not understand English well enough to
interpret our nation’s laws.
* If you perceive the Constitution as a living,
breathing document, then you’ve spent entirely too much time before the wrong
kind of bar to qualify for a seat on the Supreme Court.
* If you think the general welfare clause empowers
Congress to redistribute wealth through those programs we call “welfare,”
you are disqualified.
* If you interpret “commerce” not as the large-scale
trading of commodities, but instead as any scenario in which a dollar might
change hands, 
your
nomination must be rejected.
* If you believe in the anti-constitutional,
anti-federalist concept of “incorporation,” by which restrictions on federal
power are applied to all levels of government, even when the Constitution
explicitly distinguishes between them as it does in the first Amendment, you
are unacceptable.
* If you think a punishment violates the Eighth
Amendment if it is either cruel or
unusual, and not just if it is both cruel and
unusual, then you need to be sent to Conjunction Junction for a remedial
course.
* If you think the government is allowed to violate the
Constitution if it has a “compelling interest” to do so, you should be compelled to take
interest in another line of work.
* If, like David Souter, you cannot be bothered to get
a clean shave for your confirmation hearings, but instead show up in the Senate
chamber looking like Barney Rubble, then you have demonstrated that your
judgment cannot be trusted.
* If you would argue that by coining the term
“independent judiciary,” our founders meant the courts should not be subject to
constitutional checks and balances, you are already announcing your intention
to exceed your authority, and must therefore be stopped.
* If you’ve ever asserted a Ninth Amendment right, as
the Court did in Roe v. Wade, then
you must be prevented from acting on that belief, for the simple reason that
there are no such things as Ninth Amendment rights.
* If you think the specific Fourth Amendment rights to
be secure in our persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches
and seizures have melded over time into a generalized “right to privacy,” then
what you are practicing is linguistic alchemy, not law.
* If you think judges should be able to amend the
Constitution by rephrasing it in their opinions, as the Court did in the Kelo eminent
domain case by changing “public use” to “public purpose,” then you cannot be
entrusted with that kind of power.
* If you believe the three-fifths clause denied the
full personhood of black people, or that the Constitution has ever contained
any language condoning slavery, you’ve never bothered to read the document, and
the Supreme Court is no place for on-the-job training.
*
If you agree with Stephen Breyer that American law may be judged by foreign
precedents, including those from the same Zimbabwean supreme court that
approved Robert Mugabe’s murderous “land reform” program, then not only
shouldn’t you be on our Supreme Court, but you should be forbidden for your own
safety from even handling a gavel.
* If you agree with the majority opinion from Planned Parenthood v. Casey that, “At
the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of
meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” your nomination
should never be confirmed, unless you’ve been nominated for induction to the
Dingbat Hall of Fame.
* If you are now or have ever been a member of the
ACLU, you have already failed most of the tests listed here, but just in case
there’s still any question, GO AWAY!
In the unlikely event that Obama appoints someone who
passes all these litmus tests, that nominee ought to be swiftly and
overwhelmingly confirmed. If, on the other
hand, the Jellyphants back away from their defiant
pose, and once again accept the premise that applying standards is unfair, then
they may soon discover that there are litmus tests for reelection to the
Senate, too.
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