BrianGarst.com

Not that I have any firm evidence that Kennedy was drinking when he wrote this shrieking hit piece on Justices Roberts and Alito, but as a general principle, it’s safe to just assume Teddy has a permanent blood alcohol level of about .20.

Now that the votes are in from their first term, we can see plainly the agenda that Roberts and Alito sought to conceal from the committee. Our new justices consistently voted to erode civil liberties, decrease the rights of minorities and limit environmental protections. At the same time, they voted to expand the power of the president, reduce restrictions on abusive police tactics and approve federal intrusion into issues traditionally governed by state law.

Teddy believes that Alito and Roberts “misled” him on their views, but this is nonsense. They’ve practiced exactly the same philosophy on the Supreme Court as they have throughout their entire careers. For this to now surprise Teddy suggests he isn’t all there to begin with. Nowhere in his rant does he ever raise a single legal objection to any decision. Rather, he relies on vague generalities and buzzwords to whip up a frenzy in his extremist base. As NRO correctly points out, his real problem is that he doesn’t like their results, though he has neither the understanding nor the inclination to determine whether those results would be legally justified.

But the senator from Massachusetts provides all the evidence one needs that, for some senators anyway, it is not legal thinking that matters at all. It is only results. From start to finish, this column amounts to one long whine that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito don’t share Senator Kennedy;s view that Senator Kennedy;s policy preferences should be enacted by the Supreme Court. What Kennedy doesn’t have is anything resembling a legal argument against a vote cast, or an opinion written or joined, by either of these two justices.

It’s noteworthy that Teddy and others on the left manage to be exactly backwards when it comes to results versus process. In the case of government programs, they refuse to hold government departments accountable and are perfectly happy to get no results whatsoever. There exists no better example than the Department of Education. But they take just the opposite, though equally wrong, view with the Judiciary. Whereas judges must put law (process) ahead of specific outcomes in order to insure the integrity of the system, liberals like Teddy demand their policies be enacted by judicial fiat, and any who stands in their way is to be declared as “anti” whatever victim group de jour they are wringing their hands over at that particular point in time.