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Squandering a Supreme opportunity
...A vacancy creates a rare advocacy occasion for the president because the public is then riveted on the Supreme Court for longer than a sound bite. If President Bush sincerely desires to entrench the Bork-Scalia-Roberts original meaning philosophy in the Supreme Court, he must bring the public along through statesmanlike explanations of what is at stake, i.e., the rule of law and process, not particular results. The history of liberty has largely been a history of holding each branch of government within constitutional bounds.

The advocacy task is difficult, nevertheless, because process commands no impassioned and well-funded supporters. In contrast, the opponents of process obsessed with results -- whether liberals or conservatives -- are organized and vocal. Thus, liberals would manipulate the Commerce Clause to enact federal laws banning guns in schools or transforming state crimes against women into federal cases. Conservatives are equally eager for Congress to brandish the Clause to prohibit partial birth abortions or to thwart Oregon's Death With Dignity Act, or to act without a crumb of constitutional power to disturb a final Florida state court judgment concerning Terri Schiavo's vegetative state. Whereas liberals rejoiced at the Supreme Court's invocation of the "mysteries of the universe" and the "moral fact that one belongs to oneself and not to another or to society" to proclaim rights to an abortion and homosexual sodomy, conservatives similarly crave to wield corresponding fatuousness to promulgate an embryo's constitutional right to birth and a constitutional prohibition against suicide or assisted suicide. ...