🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <daib9e$re4$3@blue.rahul.net>,
 Merlin Dorfman <dorfman@green.rahul.net> wrote:
>David M. Nieporent <nieporen@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:
>> Merlin Dorfman wrote:
>>> In ca.general Frank White <fwhite*NOSPAM*@colfax.com> wrote:

>>>      You are exactly "right," pardon the pun.  This court has moved
>>> the interpretation of the law far to the right, from things like
>>> denying states the right to keep guns off school campuses to
>>> reversing progress on civil rights, and many other areas.

>> You're mistaken.  None of that happened.  The Supreme Court made *no* ruling 
>> on what states can do about guns on school campuses.  The Supreme Court 
>> ruled that the *federal* government can't legislate about local issues such 
>> as that.  (And even that's an exaggeration; all they actually said was that 
>> Congress can't do so except as part of a comprehensive regulatory scheme.)

>     My mistake; I meant to say denying the Federal government the
>right to regulate guns on school campuses.  Do you doubt that the
>Warren Court, or even the Minnesota Twins, would have ruled otherwise?

I have doubt that it would have come to that, because I doubt that Congress 
in the 1950s would have considered trying to criminalize purely local 
behavior with no economic nexus at all.  But in any case, 

 (1) the issue in this thread was not whether the current court is as far 
left as the Warren-Brennan/Brennan-Marshall courts, but whether the current 
court is "far right."

 (2) we can cherry pick issues all day.  Do you doubt that these earlier 
courts would have ruled the other way on _Lawrence v. Texas_?  Or _Rasul_?


>> I don't know what "reversing progress on civil rights" means; it's vague
>> and unclear. But I do know that this "far to the right" Supreme Court has,
>> in recent years,

>>    (a) upheld Roe,
>>    (b) upheld Miranda,
>>    (c) upheld race preferences in college admissions,

>     ...and reduced/limited the scope of all these.

Nope.  If anything, abortion rights have _expanded_ since Roe; try to 
reconcile Stenberg with the relatively narrow language of Roe.  Miranda 
wasn't "reduced" at all.  Miranda, one of the key symbols of judicial 
activism in the Warren era, was upheld by the Rehnquist court in Dickerson, 
with Rehnquist himself joining the majority.

And unless one actually takes seriously O'Connor's dicta about race 
preferences not being necessary in 25 years, the Court did not 
"reduce/limit" anything in the Michigan cases.  This was actually a more 
liberal decision than Bakke.

>...
>>    (g) struck down the death penalty for the retarded,
>>    (h) struck down the death penalty for juveniles,

>     Limited rather than reduced, I believe.

I don't know what that means, but they created new restrictions on the 
application of the death penalty that never existed before -- restrictions 
they had rejected not many years earlier.


I could add the VMI case as evidence of the court's liberalism, as well.

---------------------------------------------
David M. Nieporent    nieporen@alumni.princeton.edu