06/29/05

In wars, even cultural ones, it is crucial to know the opposition -- their strategies, their theories, their deceptions. Mark R. Levin's 'Men in Black: How the Supreme Court is Destroying America,' a New York Times best-seller, is a right-wing debaters' manual that furnishes rhetoric to Tom DeLay, Bill Frist and their cohorts as they campaign to revamp the federal judiciary in their own image. ... But it is the chapter titles that set the table with raw meat: 'Radicals in Robes,' 'Socialism from the Bench,' 'Al Qaeda Gets a Lawyer,' 'Justices in the Bedroom,' etc. Levin's thesis: Good judges ... are originalists [who] 'look to the text of the Constitution and the intent of the framers when deciding a constitutional question.' Activist judges, on the other hand, 'see their role limited only by the boundaries of their imaginations,' and 'they substitute their will for the judgment of deliberative bodies'...

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2181/

from In These Times, by Stephen J. Fortunato Jr.