Time to open us up a can of (domestic) whoopass.

Senator John Cornyn makes this point ("Senate Sense & Nonsense. SCOTUS rules of order.") about one of President Clinton's Supreme Court nominees:

[Ruth Bader] Ginsburg, a brilliant jurist, had served as general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union — a liberal organization that has championed the abolition of traditional marriage laws and attacked the Pledge of Allegiance. She had previously written that traditional marriage laws are unconstitutional; that the Constitution guarantees a right to prostitution; that the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Mother's Day, and Father's Day are all discriminatory institutions; that courts should force taxpayers to pay for abortions, against their will; and that the age of consent for sexual activity should be lowered to age 12

Given the realities of Justice Ginsburg's views, Mr. Clinton did not care a fig about preserving the Court's ideological balance as it had existed before the retirement of Justice Byron White. Ergo, Bush shouldn't have to nominate someone just like Justice O'Connor.

The left will scream bloody murder about any threat to stare decisis^[1] as though the accelerated betrayal of the Constitution by the Supreme Court since the thirties has become holy writ. Judicial error, once committed, you see, is forever insulated from remediation, so long as it supports the unrestrained expansion of federal power and the concomitant evisceration of the (once) sovereign states. The left will tar as an extremist any nominee who is unwise enough to suggest that there is nothing sacred about bad precedent.

Justice Clarence Thomas, God bless him, knew the true meaning of the Commerce Clause and for his originalist views endured what may have been the most stomach-churning campaign of character assassination of 20th century American politics.

In contrast, someone as radical as Justice Ginsburg slipped onto the Court with the Republicrats being ever so gentlemanly and accommodating. Let's hope President Bush nominates someone with a little fire in his or her belly for the cause of the "dead" Constitution, as Jonah Goldberg aptly describes it ("Better Off Dead. A conservative Constitution"). When the Demuglicans yell bloody murder over someone who understands the place of Article I, section 8 in the constitutional scheme, let them be reminded of Justice Ginsburg, and the battle go on from there.

With the President pretty much in a state of terminal cluelessness on the "Islam is a religion of peace" deal (at least publicly), it's not promising that he will be particularly prescient on the issues of

• the pretzelization of the 14th Amendment,
• the fevered annulment of state law by extension of the Bill of Rights,
• the reckless extension of the Commerce Clause to sanction any assertion of federal power,
• the indirect bypassing of Article I, section 8 by grants in aid,
• the bloatation of the Necessary and Proper Clause,
• the mausoleumization of the Tenth Amendment, and
• the ignorification of the Second Amendment.

Mr. Bush's instincts on a bad day are infinitely preferable to Justice Ginsburg's cerebrations on a good day, however, so he may yet kick some ass.

It's working in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why not here?

Notes
^[1] This is an incredibly sophisticated legal concept that is difficult for mere mortals to grasp. In the simplest of terms it means "what we said before on any issue is absolutely locked in stone and will destroy the Republic if changed unless, of course, it's convenient for us to do something different, in which case kindly STFU."