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Jewish World Review Sept. 12, 2000 / 11 Elul, 5760

Ann Coulter

Ann Coulter
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The Supreme Court ratchet

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- IT'S HARD TO SEE how Democrats can use the Supreme Court as a campaign issue anymore. It would take a modern plague to make any headway in confining the justices to interpreting the Constitution rather than issuing wild policy pronouncements offensive to most Americans.

In a case decided last term, Steinberg vs. Carhart, the Supreme Court ruled that states cannot prohibit partial-birth abortion (or what the media call "what its opponents call partial-birth abortion").

Meanwhile, vast majorities of Americans oppose the killing of a half-born fetus, including politicians who are otherwise copacetic with baby-killing, such as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Sen. Tom Daschle. In a recent Los Angeles Times poll, two-thirds of respondents and more than 70 percent of women thought all abortions after the first trimester should be completely banned.

Admittedly, if the Constitution actually said something to the effect that sucking a baby's brains out is a constitutional right, it wouldn't matter what the polls say. Not to be a stickler, but the Constitution does not say that. The right to abortion is based on nonexistent penumbras from a nonexistent right to privacy.

The apocryphal "right to privacy" was first invented by five justices on the Supreme Court in the 1965 case Griswold vs. Connecticut. That case held that married couples have a "privacy" right to purchase contraceptives. Though a narrow majority immediately agreed on the desired result, initially they could not agree on how to wrest such a "privacy" right from the Constitution. Eventually they cited genuine constitutional rights like those against unreasonable searches and seizures and against the taking of private property without compensation, among others, as the source of the nonexistent right to "privacy."

If a general right to "privacy" doesn't leap out at you from those other rights, you're not the only one. As Justice Hugo Black wrote in dissent: "The average man would very likely not have his feelings soothed any more by having his property seized openly than by having it seized privately and by stealth. He simply wants his property left alone."

But the court droned on about the right of married couples to contraception being a "right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights -- older than our political parties, older than our school system." Of course, the Constitution still didn't say anything about contraception. But all the blather about "sacred" bonds of marriage sounded portentous enough to be plausible.

Imaginary rights are easier to swallow if they are consistent with the country's traditions and practices, not to say normal human impulses.

Except that since there really is no "right to privacy," there could be no way to define or limit the make-believe right. Before you knew it, the exalted "right to privacy" included the right to kill babies. That didn't sound so plausible anymore.

Indeed, the phony right to privacy, as interpreted in Roe vs. Wade, overruled the laws of all 50 states, most of which criminalized abortion at the time. Today -- still -- 30 years later, support for that decision is at an all-time low, from an anemic 56 percent in 1991 to 43 percent this year.

This despite the rather hefty leg-up Roe gave the pro-abortion forces by declaring abortion not merely legal, but a full-blown constitutional right. As prohibitionists learned with the 21st Amendment and abolitionists learned with the Civil War, once something has been legal for awhile, it's hard to persuade its devotees to give it up.

Moreover, at least Roe gave the states authority to ban abortion in the third trimester. The current Supreme Court has managed to locate a constitutional right to suck the brains out of a baby who has made it well past the third trimester and right into the birth canal.

It was bad enough when the Supreme Court hallucinated new constitutional rights to minor and relatively noncontroversial things, like contraceptives for married couples. The current Supreme Court is hallucinating constitutional rights to macabre, blood-curdling procedures opposed by a huge majority of Americans.

Someday I'd like to see a true right-wing court just to demonstrate what "conservative" judicial activism would really look like. To correspond to the "living Constitution" wielded by liberal jurists, the court would have to start discovering constitutional clauses invalidating the income tax, prohibiting abortion across the nation, and protecting the right to suck the brains out of Democrats -- all in the penumbras, you understand.

It would be a lot of fun for a few months, and then the justices could admit it was just a joke and overrule it all. We could go back to living under a Constitution and not a tyranny of disassociated lunatics. Best of all, we probably wouldn't hear so much about judicial restraint being a partisan issue anymore.


JWR contributor Ann Coulter is the author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton. You may visit the Ann Coulter Fan Club by clicking here.


Up

09/08/00: Our mistake -- keep polluting
09/05/00: Bubba protects and serves
09/01/00: AlGore's 'going out of business!' tax plan
08/29/00: Bush's compassionate conservatism
08/25/00: Space alien tells funny jokes in bathtub
08/22/00: Dems view world only in black and white, not in color
08/18/00: Another Damascus Road conversion
08/15/00: The viagra cotillion
08/11/00: The hand-wringing Hamlet from Hartford
08/07/00: The Democratic party's white face
08/04/00: Hillary's potty mouth
08/01/00: The hole in the story
07/28/00: Cheney's detractors can't get their story straight
07/25/00: AlGore: Elmer Blandry
07/21/00: The tyranny of non-objectivity
07/18/00: The state's religion
07/14/00: Reform it back
07/11/00: Keating for veep
07/07/00: Gore invented 'Clueless'
07/04/00: The stupidity litmus test
06/30/00: O.J. was 'proved innocent' too
06/27/00: The last guys 'proved innocent'
06/23/00: Serious Republican candidates don't get serious press
06/19/00: They weren't overzealous this time
06/16/00: Evolution of the strumpet
06/13/00: Actual journalistic malpractice
06/09/00: I did not have sexual
relations with that ... man!
06/06/00: IRS turns Bubba's screw
05/30/00: Too corrupt to be an Arkansas lawyer
05/26/00: Choose liberalism
05/24/00: Violence against coherence
05/22/00: Developmentally disabled Republicans
05/16/00: For womb the bell tolls
05/12/00: Asylum from Georgetown
05/10/00: The truth is out there, even for the clueless
05/08/00: Barbie is a liberal Democrat
05/02/00: Moving the goalpost
04/28/00: The bastardization of justice
04/25/00: How Monica Lewinsky saved the constitution
04/24/00: It's sunny today, so we need gun control
04/19/00: No shadow of a doubt -- liberal women are worthless
04/14/00: It takes a Communist dictator to raise a child
04/11/00: The verdict is in on Hillary
04/07/00: Vast Concoctions III
04/04/00: 'Horrifying' free speech in New York
03/31/00: Campaign finance reform brings out worst in senators
03/28/00: All the news that fits -- we print!
03/24/00: Net losses all around
03/20/00: To protect, serve --- and be spat on
03/16/00: Thank Heaven for the consigliere
03/13/00: Vast concoctions II
03/09/00: The bluebloods voted against you
03/07/00: The Tower of Babble
03/03/00: Vast concoction
03/02/00: Hillary's sartorial lies
02/28/00: You have to break a few eggs to make a joke
02/22/00: I've seen enough killing to support abortion
02/18/00: A liberal lynching
02/15/00: McCain and the flag
02/11/00: The Shakedown Express
02/08/00: To mock a mockingbird
02/05/00: Summing up Campaign 2000: 'Oh, puh-leeze!'
02/01/00: A Confederacy of Dunces
01/28/00: Dollar Bill's racist smear
01/24/00: How high is your freedom quotient?
01/21/00: Numismadness
01/18/00: How dare you attack my wife!
01/14/00: The Gore Buggernaut
01/10/00: The paradox of discrimination law

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