The recent nomination of arch conservative judge ‘Scalito’ to the Supreme Court coupled with Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s failure to indict Rove, Cheney, Bush and the entire Republican Party for the war in Iraq has pushed liberals beyond the limits of even their usual psychosis. Having never actually recovered from their post election catatonia, Democrats stunned by the possibility that they might not be able to impeach Bush for war crimes emerged from their bizarro universe long enough to force a closed senate session, demanding to know what happened to an investigation of prewar intelligence they had been briefed on the previous week. Meanwhile the media, the National Association of Gals and the rest of the Democratic base finally forgot about Cindy Sheehan and mobilized to oppose the shocking nomination of a white male to the Supreme Court.

The maroon article by (as I recall) a ‘sick republican’ from last week typifies the obsessive neurosis spreading from American’s left, which threatens to overwhelm even once rationale minds and warp debate that should be occurring within the nation’s universities and among our finest intellectuals. The nomination of a judge for the Supreme Court ought to provoke discussion guided by an understanding of the proper role of a justice, regarding whether a nominee is likely to fulfill this role and enforce the constitution instead of treating the document as ‘living’ and open to whatever interpretation might satisfy his moral, ethical or political whims. It is as equally dangerous to support a nominee who is ‘pro life’ as to support one who is ‘pro abortion;’ if justices are to be chosen by a litmus test the court will become nothing more than an elite and lifelong branch of the legislature, and our nation’s founding principle of limited government grounded by a strong constitution will be lost.

To continually appoint judges who insist that, for example, the interstate commerce clause covers all commercial transactions or that a ‘right to privacy’ might be inferred from the constitution serves only to erode the limits on our republic that allow a morally and ethnically diverse (and clearly divided) people to live together no matter who happens to sit in the oval office. If some fundamental flaw truly exists in the constitution then it ought to be amended, but the party that denies the constitution places any bounds on its power and refuses to recognize any authority apart from the masses to which it caters ought not to exist, much less be suffered to impede the function of the nation’s legislature in a time of war with endless obstruction and obsessive fixation on events surrounding the loss of power it never deserved.