Hillary Clinton finally explains the Supreme Court's role

You know, it's kind of ridiculous for a junior senator to be accorded this much press attention, but that's the world we live in, and it does mean that we finally get a clear insight into the Left's view about the very limited role the Supreme Court is supposed to play (and now we know for sure which base Hillary has decided to pander to). First bit of bad reasoning:

I have an obligation to my constituents to make sure that I cast my vote for Chief Justice of the United States for someone I am convinced will be steadfast in protecting fundamental women's rights, civil rights, privacy rights, and who will respect the appropriate separation of powers among the three branches.

Please note that Hillary, a lawyer, doesn't even pretend that the Supreme court has a non-legislative role. Instead, the Supreme Court now sits to protect women's rights, civil rights and privacy rights (read "women's right to abortion"). Last time I read Justice Marshall's seminal 1803 case, Marbury v. Madison (5 U.S. 137), that was not the Supreme Court's role. Marshall, of course, stated the long-standing rule that the Supreme Court's role was to review law under Constitutional guidelines. Apparently Hillary doesn't think we even need to pretend anymore to follow this 200+ year old rule. For Hillary to follow this perversion of the Court's role -- a perversion that arrogates to the Court the powers of an unelected legislature -- by saying that a judge must "respect the appropriate separation of powers among the three branches" is scary doublespeak. The doublespeak continues. Get this one:

In one memo, for example, Judge Roberts argued that Congress has the power to deny the Supreme Court the right to hear appeals from lower courts of constitutional claims involving flag burning, abortion, and other matters. He wrote that the United States would be far better off with fifty different interpretations on the right to choose than with what he called the "judicial excesses embodied in Roe v. Wade." The idea that the Supreme Court could be denied the right to rule on constitutional claims had been so long decided that even the most conservative of Judge Roberts's Justice Department colleagues strongly disagreed with him.

Thus, Hillary uses one case -- Roe v. Wade -- to make it sound as if Roberts, rather than insisting that the Court engage only in true judicial review on Constitutional issues, wants to remove the Court entirely from such review. Of course, even Roe's staunchest critics -- if they're honest -- concede that Roe has no constitutional basis whatsoever. To criticize Roe, therefore, is not the same as announcing that the Supreme Court will henceforth no longer rule on Constitutional matters. This is a specially dishonest argument, by the way, coming as it does on the heels of Hillary's opening principle that the Court exists, not to pass statutes under judicial review, but solely to preserve minority and women's rights. Here's yet another disingenuous statement:

Adding to testimony that clouded more than clarified is that we in the Senate have been denied the full record of Judge Roberts's writings despite our repeated requests.

Again, Hillary's background as a lawyer means that she knows that the attorney-client relationship is one of the most sacred in the legal canon. The fact that this administration wants to put Roberts forward for the Supreme Court does not make it incumbent on the administration to waive the Government's attorney-client privilege for the last 20 years. For her to hide that argument under a bland sentence is, simply, dishonest. And, to finish up, Hillary again makes clear the limited role she envisions for her desired Supreme Court:

My desire to maintain the already fragile Supreme Court majority for civil rights, voting rights and women's rights outweigh the respect I have for Judge Roberts's intellect, character, and legal skills.

Well, at least the charade is over. The Supreme Court does not exist to review the laws of the State and Federal Legislatures to make sure that they do not violate the United States Constitition -- the document that is the bedrock of our society. Instead, it has one narrow function (to make sure women can get abortion on demand) and a few peripheral voting rights obligations (read -- support laws that will increase the number of Democratic voters). And because a brilliant jurist stubbornly clings to the belief that his role is to be a guardian of the Constitution, Hillary has assured her base that she thinks he is not a fitting person for our Supreme Court. UPDATE: For a really great analysis about how Roe has operated to corrupt the role our society (or at least the Left side of it) assigns to the Constitution and the Supreme Court, check out this classy post at Paragraph Farmer.