Well, a group of English Classical Liberal students are going to be contributing to this blog for the next few weeks. I’ll start off by stating that Prime Minister’s Questions is occurring now. The topic of debate is reform of the Houses, separation of power of the legislature and executive, and the creation of a written constitution.

If you’re a British reader, you can watch PMQs live here.

But Mr Brown does not plan to allow the people their say on reform. Both Iain Duncan Smith MP (Con) and Bob Wareing MP (Independent) have demanded that the executive become accountable to the Commons.

Mr Brown leads a fragile government, and after a year of continuous scandal for the Labour Party, he knows that to leave any decision to the people will be just another disaster for his drowning Party’s attempt to survive.

Read here how Obama wants it both ways on the right to bear arms issue.

 Read this ominous prediction of the damage Obama could do with appointments to the Supreme Court.

William J. Brennan, Jr., like many of his colleagues then and now (today, think Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg, Breyer), and countless other federal and state judges throughout the United States, are not just liberals, which would be bad enough. They are, philosophically, collectivists and statists who believe with the orthodoxy of zealots that “rights” are created by society and its Platonic guardians, the judges, and that through the exercise of government power utopian goals can be achieved without regard to constitutional principles or the moral code that underlay them at the Founding.

 

In short, Brennan and his ilk are utterly indifferent to the proper role of judges, and see themselves as uber-legislators imposing their personal policy preferences on the unwashed in the guise of constitutional interpretation.

 

Which bring us to the current election and presumptive Democrat Party nominee, Barack Obama.

 

There are some serious concerns if the fate of the federal judiciary, let alone the Supreme Court, falls into Obama’s hands (especially with a compliant Senate). Let’s take a look at the words of Obama himself:

 

On July 17, 2007, Obama made a speech in Washington, D.C. to the country’s leading abortion-meisters, “Planned Parenthood.” In the words of NBC reporter Carrie Dean, Obama not only “leveled harsh words at conservative Supreme Court justices,” but “he offered his own intention to appoint justices with ‘empathy’.”

 

“Empathy,” according to Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, is “the projection of one’s own personality into the personality of another in order to understand him better; ability to share in another’s emotions or feelings.”

 

Thus, we have been unmistakably warned that Obama will appoint Supreme Court justices who will not honestly interpret the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and Fourteenth Amendment—let alone on the basis of what they say and meant to those who wrote them—but who, instead, will project their own personalities into others to understand them better; justices who can share in those others’ emotions or feelings.

 

And who might Obama’s empathy-receivers be?

 

Obama himself told us in that same 2007 Planned Parenthood speech: “We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that’s the criteria by which I’m going to be selecting my judges.” (My emphasis.)

 

So much for the classical liberal philosophy that was at the founding’s core and in its fundamental documents. From now on, constitutional interpretation Obama-style is to be through the eyes of whom he sees as society’s alleged victims.

 

Obama’s confession drops Brennan’s Living Constitutionalism into yet a lower rung of hell. His confession reveals that while the Brennanites fed the Living Constitution’s voracious appetite in order to achieve the amorphous goals of “social justice, brotherhood, and human dignity,” Obama will nurture the beast with what’s left of limited government and individual rights, all in the name of “empathy”—a code word for something much darker: sacrifice of constitutionalism to the needs of society’s perceived victims.

 

This perversion of America’s essence—individuals as supreme, with government as their servant—is Brennanism squared. While our Nation has been able to survive Brennanism—though with the recent Guantanamo decisions, especially Boumediene v. Bush, who knows?— will it be able to survive Obama-appointed Supreme Court justices?

 

 That is the title of this article, which is not about the conditions at Guantanamo since they are amazingly soft and lenient, but about the Supreme Court’s unconstitutional overriding of the political branches of government. 

 The five Supreme Court judges who decided that captured terrorists being held prisoner by US forces should be granted the right of habeas corpus, thus arrogantly appointing themselves legislators in defiance of the Constitution, need to be reminded of this:

‘Be you ever so high, the Law is above you.’