There’s a new epidemic spreading amongst the liberal elites in response to President Bush’s appointments to the Supreme Court. Court followers who recognize Chief Justice John Robert’s style as judicially cautious and resistant to major changes must find the persistent leftist outrage baffling, but that’s because they don’t understand how the statist mind works. To them, Roberts is evil not because of how he interprets law, but by who wins and loses in those choices. In typical fashion the legal merits of the cases Roberts’ has helped decide are irrelevant when compared to the advancement of the left’s agenda. As such, they have gone absolutely haywire following a recent rash of carefully considered and well founded Supreme Court decisions.

Exhibit A: Helen Thomas cries that the Supreme Court is “meaner.” Not surprisingly, the basis for her attack is not sound judicial evidence or argument, but simply raw emotionalism.

Before closing down for the summer last month, the high court tossed out a flurry of decisions that overturned or reinterpreted long-standing liberal precedents.

The court under Chief Justice John Roberts seems intent on rolling back advances in race and gender relations that have helped America achieve a more equal and humane society.

The 5-4 decisions of the conservative court dealt with race, abortion, free speech, church-state relations and a host of other issues. They also showed a pro-business and anti-consumer slant.

The majority justices are running counter to the current trend against right-wing ideologues and a power-grabbing unilateral presidency.

On race, the court apparently has decided to return to the “good old days” when separate was considered equal when it came to racial segregation, a concept that the high court discarded in the 1954 landmark decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., which desegregated the nation’s schools.

Last week, the Supreme Court junked the Brown rule when it struck down the use of race in school admissions in Seattle and Louisville. Officials had used race as a factor in school assignments in order to build diversity.

The historic Brown ruling paved the way for the banning of segregated public facilities, hotels, restaurants and theaters.

Justice Thomas addressed just this sort of nonsensical demagoguery in his concurrence, previously highlighted here.

Exhibit B: E. J. Dionne has slammed down the statist stave and declared “You shall not pass (another competent jurist)!”

Just say no.

The Senate’s Democratic majority — joined by all Republicans who purport to be moderate — must tell President Bush that this will be their answer to any controversial nominee to the Supreme Court or the appellate courts.

The Senate should refuse even to hold hearings on Bush’s next Supreme Court choice, should a vacancy occur, unless the president reaches agreement with the Senate majority on a mutually acceptable list of nominees.

. . .As for the Supreme Court, we now know that the president’s two nominees, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, are exactly what many of us thought they were: activist conservatives intent on leading a judicial counterrevolution. Yesterday’s 5 to 4 ruling tossing out two school desegregation plans was another milestone on the court’s march to the right.

Even after he was confirmed, Roberts was talking about something other than the 5 to 4 conservative court we saw this year on case after case. In a speech at Georgetown University Law School in May 2006, Roberts rightly argued that “the rule of law is strengthened when there is greater coherence and agreement about what the law is.” It’s a shame this quest for broader majorities had so little bearing on the 2007 Roberts-led court.

To call Roberts and Alito activists shows a laughable understanding of recent court decisions. In fact, Roberts has practiced self restraint (I would argue too much) and attempted to craft narrow decisions. The recent term has seen many unanimous decisions. Dionne blames Roberts for the few narrowly decided cases, but the reality is that the more liberal minority is frequently more concerned with outcomes than being good jurists. This is a typical fault of those who believe in activist government and who sees the court not as the arbiter of law that it is, but as a tool to promote desirable policies that cannot get passed by the Constitutionally prescribed means.

Countering Dionne, I propose that we “just say no” to judicial analysis more concerned with promoting specific policies than a particular approach to the Constitution and the law.

Fox says Carol Burnett can’t take a joke.

The actress says Fox and its “Family Guy” show paid her back for refusing access to her music and other copyrighted materials by lampooning her in an episode of the animated TV comedy, and now she wants them to pay for the indignity.

In a suit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, Burnett and her Whacko production company seek more than $2 million for alleged copyright infringement and other claims.

Oh, the irony. It’s exactly this kind of frivolous, entitlement-minded nonsense that clogs up our courts and prevents the timely hearing of important issues. Thankfully, courts have historically granted broad leeway for satirical works on the issue of copyright, as creating a likeness is a necessary part of creating a satire. I expect this lawsuit to go no where, but it’s telling about the state of modern tort when you realize that most people reading the paper will likely find this suit rather tame. I mean, only $2 million? John Edwards would’ve asked for $200 million!

Just when you think the lawyers have defeated sanity and removed personal responsibility entirely from our lives, a story comes along to restore a bit of hope for a future dominated by reason over emotion.

Yesterday, a Texas judge tossed out a lawsuit against MySpace, the world’s biggest social-networking site brought by the family of a 13-year-old girl assaulted by a man who found her through her MySpace page.

. . .In dismissing the suit, the judge wrote: “To impose a duty under these circumstances for MySpace to confirm or determine the age of each applicant, with liability resulting from negligence in performing or not performing duty, would of course stop MySpace’s business in its tracks and close this avenue of communication…”

In the end, according to the judge, “If anyone had a duty to protect Julie Doe, it was her parents, not MySpace.”

These same parents would want to know who little Julie Doe is playing with on the playground, so why do they think they don’t need to know who she is playing with on the internet?

Parents: Neither MySpace nor any of the other social networking sites are daycare centers. They are not responsible for the welfare of your children. You are.

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.