‘Ruling on Final Day of Court’s Term Solidifies a Lurch to the Right,” says a New York Times front-page headline assuming editorializing is equivalent to news reporting. The truth is that the court has been solidifying a return to a democratic republic. We’re talking about the Supreme Court, of course, and how it recently halted bureaucratic autocracy, disrupted judicial oligarchy, returned power to state legislatures and recognized a true constitutional right.
One of the moves terrorizing the Times was the court telling the Environmental Protection Agency to quit mutilating private industries on the basis of nonexistent laws. Even the Times concurs that the agency has been acting on vague generalities in the law without getting it that, when you play that game, rule of law becomes rule of anything goes. If new laws are needed for the stifling of CO2 emissions, persuade Congress to pass them. What we don’t need is Justice Elena Kagan imperiously telling us that the EPA has expertise that members of Congress lack and that they should grin and bear it.
Maybe her greater vision is that there are all kinds of experts out there on all kinds of subjects that Congress flunks and that we should just maybe replace Congress with something called the administrative state that’s already with us and spreading its wings. But understand, please, that there are processes supposed to fix legislative ignorance and that experts can fumble. Kagan clearly objects to the voice of the people, fails to understand the need for checks and balances, and incredibly assumes bureaucratic wisdom.
On the second subject, abortion, the Times said the current court got rid of a constitutional right of women to have abortions when, in fact, the squashed 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling itself told states they could deny abortions in the last trimester when fetuses were viable. Forty-three states did as much. It’s still true that Roe v. Wade otherwise permitted just about all abortions on the basis of this supposed right that is no more in the Constitution than the word “abortion.”
