City Journal was gracious enough to publish a story I wrote about Germany's insane environmental policy -- which may soon be coming to a country near you once Obama gets his way.
It was based off of a paper I had written for Professor Thomas Borcherding's public choice class and an application I had submitted to The Wall Street Journal. Here's the essential paragraphs:
Greens had promised that Germany would be a Mecca for energy investment, but instead it has become a Potemkin village—fooling foreign governments into believing that its economy is a model for the future. President Obama seems to be among those taken in. “We invented solar technology, but we’ve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in producing it,” he told a joint session of Congress in February. The president has indulged in his own brand of environmental fooling, trying to persuade Americans to support his wasteful cap-and-trade bill and as much as $5 billion in tax credits for weatherization schemes like insulating homes for the winter. Obama calls this a “real stimulus.” The Germans have another word for it: Volksverdummung, a deliberate deception of the public.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s visit two weeks ago to Pomona College disappointed horribly. During the question and answer series, she belittled students’ questions and her speech seemed canned for an audience roughly double the age of the auditorium of 20-something politicos gathered to hear her. She encouraged us to teach our children – “especially our middle school aged ones” – civics. I hope it is a mathematical impossibility to have middle school aged children for such an audience. But she made clear that she didn’t want to answer any substantive questions, like her judicial philosophy, which she admitted she didn’t really have. Scalia, who spoke at for two hours at Claremont McKenna in 2006, she ain’t.
Well, it seems that the spry recent octogenarian, when she isn’t offering her opinion on matters for which she is utterly unqualified like the Iraq War study group, has reserved her ire for the direct election of state judges and the campaign contributions that make such elections possible. In the wake of Citizens United, she’s worried about all this money “sloshing around in the courtroom” and she cites statistics meant to frighten us into thinking that our judicial system’s impartiality is at risk now that those evil corporations can spend money on judicial elections. We’re used to money dominating the political sphere, but not in the courtroom, she tells us.
We need “a safe space,” she said, where judges can be judges. The problem, of course, is that Justice O’Connor is responsible for much of the problem she’s trying to combat. She's the one that is endangering the judiciary by making the bench, not the ballot box, the place of last resort.
O’Connor spent most of her time making reference to the fact that America is the only country that elects its judges. (This incidentally isn’t entirely true. Some Swiss cantons elect judges and the Japanese Supreme Court must sometimes face recall.) But so what? America, notwithstanding its president’s claims otherwise, is an exceptional place. If America, the freest, most prosperous nation in world history, is alone on a matter of policy, so be it. Maybe the rest of the world needs to conform to our standard. Indeed maybe that uniqueness, that willingness to ignore what those Europeans are doing, is why the Constitution she professes to laud has survived for so long.
She attacked America's lack of civic knowledge, but I’m frankly happy that only one third of Americans can name a judge on the Supreme Court and two-thirds know one on American Idol. That means that the Court hasn’t been intruding public policy decisions and that, I surmise, is a very good thing indeed, given the disaster that comes from federal judge seeking social justice, rather than real justice.
Maybe if judicial figures like Justice O'Connor didn't make such obviously public policy decisions on issues that greatly affect many Americans – abortion, campaign financing, school busing, and affirmative action come to mind – there wouldn't be the need for all that money to influence the process in the first place. The reason people seek to influence elections is that judges have moved out from their confines as interpreters of the law to deciders of public policy. We've moved from the rule of the people, to the rule of lawyers.
Judges lose their impartiality when they make public policy, rather than just interpret statutes. Despite her stated reverence for the Constitution today, O'Connor made public policy all the time and indeed she was praised for it. Ask yourself: would she have ever been invited to speak at Pomona College if she didn't hand down the decisions that Pomona College's elite deemed appropriate? Of course not. The student who introduced her said that O'Connor is in the "political center." I say, "And what's your point?" If judges were really as unbiased as O’Connor would like them to be, such language would be superfluous. There’s no political center of a “just” decision.
I suspect that this center seeking and attempts at always trying to make public policy from the bench comes from her record as an elected member of the Arizona Superior Court and the Arizona Senate. (1969-1979). True, she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals, but she spent only two years there before she was plucked by Ronald Reagan (Peace Be Upon Him) after promising that he would appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. (Come to think of it, maybe the fact that she was an “affirmative action” pick for the Court explains her willingness to defend what is so obviously unconstitutional.) Seeking that supposed political center is something judges do not do. They seek that which is just. Such qualities might make for good legislators but they make for disastrous judges, as even a cursory glance at some of the more contentious decisions of her tenure make clear.
The decision that really typifies that public policy focused legislator is her decision in the companion affirmative action cases. In Grutter v.Bollinger, O’Connor promised in 2003 that affirmative action was a mere "bandage" on a problem and that the Court would reexamine the government’s use of race in twenty-five years. Putting aside your personal feelings – and I should note I’m a strong opponent of racial preferences – ask yourself why should a justice be putting a time limit on a public policy if the principles of the Constitution are accessible to all men at all times? Decisions about time tables are routinely made in America, like say, slavery, but those decisions were made by elected representatives that could be held to account by their electorate. Judges, with lifetime tenure, cannot be similarly punished by the people.
O’Connor, of course, has reversed herself even on that subject as a recent article makes clear. She recently wrote that social science shows numerous benefits of affirmative action – as if that’s any different in principle from the pseudo-science that segregationists used to support “separate but equal” doctrine. Could this recourse to “social science” to rather than justice, be why trust for the judiciary is at all time low? When judges disrespect their role, they have none but themselves to blame for being seen as, in O’Connor’s words, “politicians in robes.” And like the emperor’s new clothes, we’re beginning to see judges as they really are: naked partisans.
If you'd like to hear O'Connor's address in full, please click here.
With no need to establish conservative bona fides, Irvine assemblyman Chuck DeVore has spent the last year campaigning in both old- and new-fashioned ways. He’s stumped up and down the state, driving himself to the farthest reaches of the red-county interior to pick up support from remote Republican clubs, all along regaling Facebook followers with details of his travels. In early March, despite Fiorina’s own pitch to the activist group, DeVore easily picked up the endorsement of the stalwart right-wing California Republican Assembly.
DeVore, a retired lieutenant colonel in the National Guard and a onetime aide to the late defense secretary Caspar Weinberger, has been a fixture in Orange County politics for more than two decades. (Disclaimer: He and his picture-perfect family are longtime friends of the writer and the writer’s wife, having shared holiday dinners and church pews.) Though a vice president of an aerospace firm, he has spent much of that time in pursuit of elected office.
Arriving in Sacramento in 2004, DeVore quickly became a leading conservative figure, promoting nuclear power and offshore drilling, pushing prison reform, holding the line against taxes. On Valentine’s Day 2009, to the consternation of the governor and the GOP leadership, DeVore resigned his position as chief Republican whip in protest of a $12 billion per year tax increase.
A thoughtful student of history who’s even tried his hand at fiction (he coauthored a novel about a Chinese invasion of Taiwan), DeVore has everything one could want in a U.S. senator, including a Churchillian anecdote about being shot at in Lebanon. He found a brainy communications director named Josh Trevino, who has been trying to position DeVore as the Scott Brown of California.
California, as purple as Massachusetts, does enjoy a renegade history, from Hiram Johnson’s progressives to Howard Jarvis’s tax revolt, and indeed the taxpayers’ association created by Prop 13’s late, curmudgeonly author has endorsed DeVore. The question arises: Does his perpetual pursuit of political office translate into a virtual incumbency, a liability even for so principled a figure?
