California Conservative

Rush Limbaugh has written a brilliant op-ed for today’s Wall Street Journal that’s must reading for serious conservatives. Here’s some things that jumped out at me:

We conservatives are never stronger than when we are advancing our principles. And that’s the nature of our current debate over the nomination of Harriet Miers. Will she respect the Constitution? Will she be an originalist who will accept the limited role of the judiciary to interpret and uphold it, and leave the elected branches, we, the people, to set public policy? Given the extraordinary power the Supreme Court has seized from the representative parts of our government, this is no small matter. Roe v. Wade is a primary example of judicial activism. Regardless of one’s position on abortion, seven unelected and unaccountable justices simply did not have the constitutional authority to impose their pro-abortion views on the nation. The Constitution empowers the people, through their elected representatives in Congress or the state legislatures, to make this decision.

This paragraph is vital in understanding what separates us from liberals. We care about principles first found in the Constitution and its amendments as written by the Founding Fathers and ratified by the 13 states. The U.S. Constitution was ratified in essentially the same way that Iraqis ratified their Constitution Saturday. Much of the Miers brouhaha has been fueled over speculation that she might not be someone that will respect the original intent of the Constitution.

Liberals view this as proof positive that Republican constituencies are about to go their separate ways, thereby handing the keys to D.C. over to Democrats. See my article on Howard Fineman’s delusional predicting that Bush’s coalition is all but non-existent already. What liberals don’t understand is that, at the end of the day, conservatives will take a look at the candidates running next November, decide which candidates best embody conservative values, then go to work for that candidate. We’ll do the same in 2008.

Because we believe in great ideas and ideals, this spat won’t damage our unity for more than a moment. When we win again in November, 2006, liberals will wonder how this could’ve happened. Simple. It happened because (a) liberals don’t embody the ideals we hold near and dear and (b) we love our country too much to turn the nation over to irresponsible liberals.

Abortion is only one of countless areas in which a mere nine lawyers in robes have imposed their personal policy preferences on the rest of us. The court has conferred due process rights on terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay and benefits on illegal immigrants. It has ruled that animated cyberspace child pornography is protected speech, but certain broadcast ads aired before elections are illegal; it has held that the Ten Commandments can’t be displayed in a public building, but they can be displayed outside a public building; and the court has invented rationales to skirt the Constitution, such as using foreign law to strike down juvenile death penalty statutes in over a dozen states.

This is why conservatives fight liberals over who sits on the courts. It matters because conservative justices wouldn’t think about abolishing private property rights like we found in Kelo v. New London; they wouldn’t think of ruling that child pornography is protected by the First Amendment; and they certainly couldn’t twist the Constitution enough to rule that we could display the Ten Commandments at some courthouses and not at others; and we wouldn’t go looking to foreign laws to decide Constitutional issues like Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer have done.

The real crackup has already occurred, on the left! The Democratic Party has been hijacked by 1960s retreads like Howard Dean; billionaire eccentrics like George Soros; and leftwing computer geeks like MoveOn.org. It nominated John Kerry, a notorious Vietnam-era antiwar activist, as its presidential standard-bearer. Its major spokesmen are old extremists like Ted Kennedy and new propagandists like Michael Moore. Its great presidential hope is one of the most divisive figures in U.S. politics, Hillary Clinton. And its favorite son is an impeached, disbarred, held-in-contempt ex-president, Bill Clinton.

Amen, Rush, Amen!!!

Cross-posted at ConfirmationWhoppers

This entry was posted on Monday, October 17th, 2005 at 9:08 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, DNC, Op-Ed, RNC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.