Infelicitous George
No, not George Voinovich, whose crying made me laugh. You see, he's doing it because he cares for his children and grandchildren.
My goodness, I'm glad we elected that man. We nearly elected someone who didn't care for his children and grandchildren. Sort of like that John Bolton guy. You remember that scene reported on 60 Minutes, where Bolton took a light saber and cut the heads off a bunch of junior military cadets? They were all his grandchildren.
No, I'm talking about George Will. I'm not a great fan of his, either, but lately he seems as if he's had a few useful things to say. Today I read his comments about Janice Rogers Brown, that she's out of the mainstream, specifically because she rejects the New Deal court. This much is true.
But here's how George explains it: "She has expressed admiration for the supreme court's pre-1937 hyperactivism in declaring unconstitutional many laws and regulations of the sort that now define the post-New Deal regulatory state."
Now, I know George is busy, but this is an important point. The post New Deal regulatory state is something that even liberals think was a revolution in constitutional law. Given how big a deal that was, and how big a change, how is it sensible to call the failure to adopt that revolution previous to its adoption, not merely activism, a term that should rather be "status quo," but "hyperactivism"?
Come to think of it, George and George seem to have something in common: They don't understand even the most basic of conservative principles, even though they're both happy to trade on conservative support.
posted by ColumbusGuy @ 3:10 AM
2 Comments:
There's "conservative" and there's outdated. Many conservative positions today were once "liberal" so it may be true after a change that what was once "conservative" or at least normal is now hyper-activist.
A true point, but I still don't think Bow-Tie George has it right. If he wants to call Brown hyperactivist, fine (although he seems to lean the other way there, implying it would be perfectly fine to have her libertarian views "leaven" the federal bench, as he says).
But that's not what he does. He says the (pre-1937) supreme court was hyperactivist. This simply isn't so, and George is adopting a hyper-liberal (which, so far as contemporary commerce clause law goes, is status quo) view of national government power. Cass Sunstein couldn't have said it better, and indeed I'd be mildly surprised if he would go so far.
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