High Court And Low Politics

by Thomas Sowell - Completed March 1st, 2007 - Towhnhall.com

Thomas Sowell remains the leading libertarian / conservative intellectual in our nation. Many think Sowell is the smartest man in America. I am one of those. Like intellectual giants of the past (people who changed the world) like Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, Thomas Sowell is consistently honest and brilliantly logical.

Sowell is the man who convinced me that our courts are evil. He has long written about the judicial contempt for the meaning of words and tyrannical lust for "the rule of judges" by those who are truly unfit to serve on our courts.

This is a three part series of articles (so far . . . Sowell has a habit of coming back and adding other thoughts later . . . . we will see if it stays 3 parts) about one of the prevailing problems of our courts. The issue is the inability of second rate justices to resist the corroding effect of public criticism by liberal university and media forces.

Here are links to all three parts:

High Court And Low Politics - Part One

A recent book on the Supreme Court in general has a chapter on Justice Thomas that devastates what has been said about him in the media. That book is "Supreme Conflict" by Jan Crawford Greenburg.

What will come as a shock to many who read this fact-filled book is that the picture of Justice Thomas as a blind follower of Justice Antonin Scalia, with whom he often votes, is completely different from the reality.

Notes made by Justice Harry Blackmun during discussions of issues among the justices make it clear that from day one Clarence Thomas staked out his own position on issues, even when all eight of his senior colleagues took the opposite position.

High Court And Low Politics - Part Two

It is understandable that liberal Democratic presidents, beginning with Franklin D. Roosevelt, loaded the Supreme Court with liberal, Democratic justices.

What is far harder to understand is how a whole succession of conservative Republican presidents -- Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Bush 41 -- managed to appoint so many liberals to the Supreme Court.

All these presidents ran on the idea that what courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, needed were judges who followed the law instead of making up their own new laws.

High Court And Low Politics - Part Three

While there is a tendency to label judges "liberal" or "conservative" -- and the labels may fit, even if somewhat loosely -- the real puzzle are judges who start out one way and move the other way over time.

In the population at large, and even among the intelligentsia, the usual movement over the years has been from left to right. The phrase "radical at twenty and conservative at forty" has been true enough, often enough, to become a cliché.

Most of the leading conservative intellectuals were at least liberal, and often radical, in their youth. That includes Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek and the whole neo-conservative movement. In politics, the leading conservative figure of the 20th century -- Ronald Reagan -- was a liberal in his early years.

On the Supreme Court of the United States, however, the movement has been in the opposite direction.

This series of articles make an excellent read for two reasons. You will learn about the basic problem with the courts of our nation and why they are slowly destroying respect for "the rule of judges", and if not already a Thomas Sowell fan, show you a little of the compelling logic which makes Thomas Sowell a great leader of our nation.