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Judicial restraint applies left and right
Sunday, July 12, 2009
By RANDY BRINSON
At a recent benefit dinner for the Committee for Justice and the Christian Coalition of Alabama, Attorney General Troy King called for ending judicial activism and racial preferences.
The remarks were extremely timely, in light of the president's nomination of appeals court Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Conservatives have decried her nomination based on her previous speeches and judicial opinions regarding judicial activism and racial preferences.
In an address to Duke Law School, Sotomayor embraced judicial activism by proclaiming that "the appellant courts are where public policy is made."
Similarly, in a 2001 speech at the University of California-Berkeley Law School, she stated her support for racial preferences by asserting that "a wise Latina woman with the richness of her life experience would likely reach a better opinion more often than a white male who had not had that experience."
Both of these issues are at the core of the ideology of the liberal judicial activists who are seeking to control the federal judiciary.
Historically, our nation has been assailed by the federal courts, beginning initially with the Dred Scott Decision, relegating human slavery to personal property, to the assault on religious expression (prayer in public schools) and the removal of the Ten Commandments from our courtrooms.
While our nation struggled with slavery, the right to vote and protection for workers' rights, these issues were ultimately settled through the legislative process.
When the courts intervened in attempts to resolve vexing social issues, these decisions frequently disregarded the will of the people, leading to even greater subjugation of individual rights and self-determination.
We have seen the sweeping reach of the federal courts into our own state. The ACLU and its allies have used the federal courts to remove the Ten Commandments and maintain the control over our elections.
They have sought to control the employment practices of businesses within our state, restrict gun ownership, and create a special set of criminal penalties based on race, gender or ethnicity.
As Attorney General King rightly pointed out in his speech in Birmingham, this was not the intent of the framers of our Constitution. They specifically called for the judiciary to be the weakest branch of government.
In fact, they envisioned a judiciary that relegated most decisions to the states, not the federal government.
King noted that Thomas Jefferson, writing in 1820, said: "A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government."
King added: "What was true then is certainly still true today. As people of faith, we must stand up against judicial activism when it seeks to undermine the principles upon which our country was founded.
"However, if we are to be more principled than them, if we are to retain our credibility, we must always condemn judicial activism, even when it would further policies with which we agree."
King's point was that if we only oppose liberal activist judges but support conservative activist judges, "then we lose our credibility and are no better than they are. Actually, we are worse than they are, because we know better."
I couldn't agree more. As conservatives, we must remember that we cannot use the courts as an instrument to advance our own agenda, no more than those on the left.
We must make a credible case to the people of our state to en gage the legislative process, not the courts, to confirm and correct the law when it fails to protect the liberty and well being of the social fabric of our society.
We, as people of faith, must remember that our own religious liberty depends on the consistent application of the law.
If we embrace the expansion of the judiciary to determine and create policy, we will find ourselves enslaved to the same judiciary that has restricted our own "pursuit of happiness."
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