Ed Brayton is a freelance writer and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Stuart Buck has a post about People for the American Way's use of a case in disparaging Michael McConnell as a potential nominee for the Supreme Court. And I think he has a point:
If you do a search for "Judge Michael McConnell," one of the first results is this page from People for the American Way. It's one of a series of pages modestly titled "Confirmed Judges Confirm Our Worst Fears." The page for the Tenth Circuit notes that McConnell voted in a single case to overturn a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board. That's it.
Anyone who is familiar with appellate law knows that there are quite a few cases where people can make honest and good faith arguments on either side of a given issue. None of that matters to PFAW. As its webpages on other circuits show, the only thing that matters is the outcome: Did the judge vote for the civil rights plaintiff, the environmental plaintiff, the union, etc.? If so, it was a good vote. But if a judge votes against any of those entities -- no matter what the reasoning, no matter whether the plaintiff had a valid claim in the first place -- it was a vote that "confirms our worst fears."
I'll only point out that the advocacy groups on the right engage in the very same kind of oversimplifications. And that's all the more reason, as we head into what looks like a long hot summer of political maneuvering over a new Supreme Court nomination or two, to remind ourselves that we shouldn't accept this sort of thing on face value. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone write that judge so-and-so once made a ruling that put cute little kittens into meat grinders, then found out after reading the ruling that it said nothing like that. I've heard from liberal advocacy groups that Clarence Thomas once ruled that it was okay for guards to beat prison inmates, and I've heard from conservative advocacy groups how a school principal banned the Declaration of Independence from school classrooms. Both were complete nonsense. So when you see the accusations flying through the air about whoever the nominee is, don't just accept them at face value. Do a little research and find out if they're being portrayed accurately. And do the same thing for claims on the other side. Truth is more important than partisan gain.
Comments
I'm so glad I found your blog. It's hard to find level headed liberal opinions. Separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult for me. I'm often swayed by the loudest voice, as I'm sure many are. Thank you for taking the time to discern.
Posted by: Garnet | June 4, 2005 1:37 PM
Truth is more important than partisan gain.
Maybe. This seems to ignore the fact, however, that the judicial nomination and confirmation process are political acts. We might not like that fact, but it is the case.
That's why conservatives railing against "activist judges" is ludicrous. The judiciary is a political branch. We might like to pretend that it isn't so, but it is the case.
Posted by: raj | June 4, 2005 6:19 PM
I was reading a book review this morning, by Tim van Gelder from the University of Melbourne philosophy department. While the book under review concerns consciousness, i have been particularly mindful of Ed's passion with regard to a certain hermeneutical ideal when he discusses the Constitution, lawful governance, judicial criticism and so forth. It is as another commentor said in a different thread, one of the reasons this blog is so valuable. In the middle of the review Tim wrote the following, which in its own way is germane to the concept that raj presents above, and to the notion of truth being more important than partisan gain.
"In the language of the mind-body discourse, we would say that commitments are not identical with, reducible to, in causal interaction with, or even realized by physical entities. In this sense at least they are abstract objects. Nevertheless, they are real, countable, temporal things, ultimately dependent in a mundane sense on the physical. It is only because the physical is the way it is that we exhibit the practices we do, and it is our practices which institute commitments. If we stopped treating each other in the right kinds of ways, all socially instituted deontic statuses would vanish without a trace.
Doxastic commitments are members of a class of entities occupying a kind of metaphysical middle ground between abstract, eternal Platonic entities on one hand, and concrete, physically-realized entities on the other. They are not part of the "bump and grind" of the "natural" world, but neither are they removed in some wholly independent, disconnected, foreign metaphysical realm. A great many of the ordinary things we deal with in everyday life belong to this category, including mortgages, fictional characters, theories, laws, songs, computer programs and (soon) cyberdollars. Entities of these kinds are set up and sustained by our practices, and so their grip on existence is as tenuous as those practices. Nevertheless, they cannot be identified with, reduced to, etc., those practices. Like the emergent contours in Kaniza-type illusions (Figure 1), they inhabit the space created by our practices, without simply being those practices. They are "triangulated" into existence by what we do.
Of course, many philosophers find such claims disturbing. They worry that such entities are weird or ghostly, lacking the comforting solidity of either physical or Platonic being. Often they attempt to eliminate such entities altogether. Sure, they say, we might talk of commitments, mortgages, fictional characters, loopholes in the law, etc., but there aren't really any such things-or there aren't really any such things. Alternatively, they attempt to identify these insolently insubstantial "things" with the some aspect of the relevant practices. However, it turns out that these strategies run into considerable difficulties whenever anyone attempts to work them out in detail.
Institution is a metaphysical relation, but it is not the same relation as identity, reduction, realisation, supervenience, or causation. If one tried to account for the place of instituted entities in the world in terms of just these five relations, a large and essential part of the story would simply be missing. It would be like trying to understand how a member of parliament is related to the people without talking about voting."
Posted by: spyder | June 5, 2005 3:32 PM
spyder
What did you say?
Posted by: aa gnome | June 6, 2005 3:40 PM