LOSING IT (Via Orrin)

Not every conservative's conservative (James P. Pinkerton, Newsday, October 4, 2005)

Harriet Miers is not a "movement conservative." That's all one needs to know about President George W. Bush's new pick for the Supreme Court - why she is going to be confirmed and why many conservatives are nervous about her.

Movement conservatives don't want to conserve the status quo; they want to change it, rolling back the last few decades in a quest for the good ol' days. In the words of movement leader Rush Limbaugh, "Women were doing quite well in this country before feminism came along." Feminism, along with liberalism, secularism, and multiculturalism, are among the "isms" the movement wants to repeal.

Such rolling back may seem like a daunting task. But the movement believes that a majority of Americans have never voted for this leftward lurch; it was imposed by the courts. That liberalizing process began, in this telling, when judges started "making" law, not "interpreting" it.

From the Warren Court in the '50s and '60s to last month's ruling by a federal judge that the Pledge of Allegiance was unconstitutional, the movement sees an effort by lefty ideologues, bolstered by the mainstream media, to bury the basic bedrock conservatism of the American people under layers of litigation and pettifoggery.

In the eyes of the movement, the existing power structures, such as most law schools and the American Bar Association, are controlled by the center-left. So the movement spawned the Federalist Society in 1982, with the express purpose of undoing judicial activism, one courtroom at a time, until America could get back to the "original intent" of the Founding Fathers.

Listening to the reaction of some critical conservatives to the Miers appointment, one could almost believe one was listening to Ted Kennedy gearing up for a filibuster. A judge who swears to uphold the Constitution and take a constructionalist approach to its interpretation is a conservative jurist who respects the democratic process. One who arrives on the job with a briefcase full of precedents he or she has sworn publically to overturn is an unelected and unaccountable social engineer.