CJ Roberts is kicking the hoary old Constitution’s ass and taking names! Even if that means making shit up to get where he needs to get, and kick the can down the road:
..if the strength of the legal reasoning of an opinion is relevant to assessing the motivation of its author – as has been so long and loudly done for all five justices in the majority of the remedy portion of Bush v. Gore, then it seems pertinent as well that Chief Justice Roberts was the only person in two years to look at this legal dispute and reach this legal conclusion.
I wonder if there has ever been another case in Supreme Court history to be decided by a single justice’s legal theory that had not previously been held or advocated by any other person in the United States before he announced it. One even he had not deemed persuasive until some time after his initial conference vote (a fact that no one seems to dispute).
I hate to keep repeating myself, but I guess I’m going to have to until people start paying closer attention: when it comes to meaning and interpretation, how you get there matters — and what it is you claim to be doing when you interpret makes all the difference in the array of “interpretations” you’re likely to reach. Intentionalism requires judicial restraint. And as the last several weeks should have taught you, there is nothing “fundamentally unserious” about any of this talk of language and hermeneutics. In fact, all the pragmatic GOP politics in the world won’t help save our liberty if we continue to cede the epistemological playing field to the leftists.
In Roberts’ case, we have a man, I’m convinced, whose hubris is strained and vain air as a great conciliator. Which gives him license, he believes, to argue not from principle but from social expedience. Of course, adhering to a coherent and legitimate hermeneutic methodology means that your ability to pretend you’ve found additional meanings in free-floating texts that you can then attribute to lawmakers (oftentimes long since gone: does anyone really think that the Clean Air Act was intended to give the EPA power of our very exhalation?) — and so it prevents you from writing law from the bench while you putatively claim to be merely reading and applying laws written and passed by others. So there’s that, too.
And of course, it’s good to be the (philosopher) king. So.
(h/t JHo and Sdferr)
The deeper he drives in order to find a basis, the more unserious he will be found by those who move on the surface of things. Being unserious to the political men has always been, and likely always will be, the charge against the philosopher [see Callicles’ charge against Socrates in Gorgias, echoed to a certain extent by Glaucon in The Republic], and why the philosopher finds himself both unwilling to make the time for politics and incapable of it to his own estimation. Hence the paradox Plato had in mind. Our difficulty, to the extent that we are not philosophers — but desire to understand them on their own terms — is grasping just this much: how serious the genuine philosopher is about his efforts, which is to say how completely unserious he is from the point of view of the political men.
“And of course, it’s good to be the (philosopher) king.”
Only good for a little while. Until he isn’t needed and no one will stand up for him. This philosopher king had his moment of usefulness because such was inevitable, but he is still on wrong side of history, appointed by the bosses and the lenders and thus acting from a false consciousness. Useful idiots and all that. The revolution benefits from this being true, so it MUST be true. The philosopher king is sitting where a loyal crony could sit. Therefore he stole a seat from the crony who might sit there and it was stolen from the people who the Crony is the agent of. The seat must be reclaimed and given to the Crony that the people demand should be there. If the useful idiot opposes this then he is a criminal and must be punished. If the useful idiot embraces this then he will be joyful that his crimes are at an end and will embrace his due punishment as his false consciousness weakens and his mind is liberated.
Rationalization is denial’s disguise.
Robert’s decision wasn’t out of line; he’s just smarter than the rest of us (ya bunch of goobers;)
palaeomerus – that is good stuff. Did you used to write faculty manuals for the U of CA system?
Worse, LTC. I hung out in coffee houses for a couple of years. They have good pastries.