To the Editor:

Jean Edward Smith seems to have the same feeling about the courts that many modern citizens do—namely, that they are entitled to a court that holds their “manifestly ideological agenda,” and if it doesn’t, someone must “bring the court to heel” and “set it straight.”

The court’s purpose, however, is not to hold any particular political agenda, but rather to interpret the Constitution and our laws—as written and originally intended by those who wrote them.

If you do not like the original intent of the Constitution or our laws, you are free to elect officials and try to change them, but it is not the role of the judiciary to, in effect, make these changes for you.

Changing the number of justices would clearly be an attempt by the executive and legislative branches to undermine the judiciary in order to achieve political gains they could not earn in the court of public opinion.

Nick Tucker
Atlanta, July 26, 2007

Note from KBJ: Amen. The distinction between law and politics used to be obvious. It has been muddled in the past few decades by progressive law professors, who say that law is just politics in disguise. Indeed, to many progressives, everything is just politics in disguise. Marriage is politics; sex is politics; economics is politics; religion is politics; even housework (for God’s sake) is politics. How many book or essay titles have you seen of the form, “The Politics of X”? I hate to break it to progressives, but not everything is “just politics,” even if everything has a political dimension. Law is an autonomous institution, with standards, concepts, processes, and methods of its own. It is not reducible to, even if it can be studied in terms of, politics. As for why progressives wish to reduce everything to politics, the answer is simple. They’re result-oriented. Their aim is to engineer society so that it accords with their progressive vision. Processes mean nothing to them. Actually, it’s worse than that. To progressives, processes, including those that constitute the rule of law, are impediments to change. Anything that impedes “progress” must be destroyed.