According to
Stuart Taylor (link via
Volokh), there's some good news about Judge Janice Rogers Brown, Bush's nominee "to the nation's second-most-powerful court, the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which has the last word on the legality of many federal environmental, health, and safety regulations." Taylor doesn't think it's good news, but I do, because it seems that Brown has:
- • Expressed approval of constitutional theories that might well (as I read them) doom Bush's own signature Medicare prescription drug benefit and proposed Social Security "personal accounts," along with the rest of the Medicare and Social Security programs and many workplace safety and environmental laws.
- • Called for the Supreme Court to return to its pre-1937 pattern of sweeping away many federal and state economic regulations by imposing severe limits on Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce and by reviving long-dead precedents such as Lochner v. New York, a now-infamous 1905 decision that conservative legal hero Robert Bork (among many others) has denounced as an "abomination."
- • Portrayed the federal government as a "leviathan" that is "crushing everything in its path" and fostering "a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible."
- • Declared that "in the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery. And we no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is ... the drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens." And senior citizens, Brown has said, "blithely cannibalize their grandchildren [to] get as much 'free' stuff as the political system will permit them to extract."
Right on, Judge. May you be confirmed to the appellate court and rise to the Supreme Court.
