Conservative court, The

Moreover, at least Roe gave the states authority to ban abortion in the third trimester. This current "conservative" Supreme Court has managed to locate a constitutional right to suck the brains out of a baby who has made it past the third trimester right into the birth canal.

With its ruling on partial-birth abortion this term, it can now be said that in just three decades the invented right of "privacy" transmogrified from the right of married couples to obtain contraceptives to the right to stick a fork in a baby's head.

It was bad enough when the Supreme Court hallucinated new constitutional rights to minor and relatively noncontroversial things, such as contraceptives for married couples. The current "conservative" Supreme Court is hallucinating constitutional rights to macabre, blood-curdling es opposed by a huge majority of Americans.

'Right to Be Left Alone'

This term, the "conservative" court also suddenly discovered a right to be left alone--or rather to be left alone from pro-lifers. In Hill v. Colorado, the court upheld a state law suppressing the 1st Amendment rights of abortion opponents outside abortion clinics.

Vagrants still have 1st Amendment rights to harass defenseless passers-by. Strikers still have rights to molest strike breakers. Animal rights fanatics still have rights to stand outside CBS studios screeching about game show contestants eating a rat on "Survivor."

The novel "right to be left alone" trumps the 1st Amendment rights only of pro-lifers.

So when the New York Times refers to the current Supreme Court as "conservative," what it means is this: There are two Supreme Court justices who are not manifestly crazy. There are three justices who have occasional bouts of sanity. And there are four who would be discovering constitutional rights to suck the brains out of people on a crowded subway-if only they could get that fifth vote.

Someday I'd like to see a true rightwing court just to show the New York Times what "conservative" judicial activism would really look like. To correspond to the "living Constitution" wielded by liberal jurists, the court would have to start discovering constitutional rights to withhold taxes, discriminate against homosexuals, and suck the brains out of Democrats-all in the penumbras you understand.

It would be a lot of fun for a few months, and then the Justices could admit it was just a joke and overrule it all. We could go back to living under a Constitution and not a tyranny of disassociated lunatics, and best of all, we probably wouldn't hear so much about judicial restraint's being a partisan "conservative" issue anymore.

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Jul 21, 2000
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