“Romney’s record as Gov. doesn’t indicate commitment to conservative judicial philosophy”

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I know. Ramesh Ponnuru — who has such great hopes for Romney conservatism (he’s The One! The new GOP lightbringer!) — will be devastated. But it is what it is — and fortunately for us, people other than the Romney “electability” brigade are paying attention, and find no great comfort in a nominating philosophy that promises not to consider political leanings.

Listen: I understand the rhetorical appeal of pretending that your criteria for judicial nominations aren’t tied to a partisan impulse — that the concern is justice, not advancing a particular political agenda. In fact, I can hardly think of anything more banal being passed off as high-mindedness by a finger-in-the-wind technocrat like Romney.

But the fact of the matter is — and this is an ideological fact, however uncomfortable it may be for some to hear — you cannot nominate someone to the judiciary who is not in fact conservative / classically liberal and claim that nomination to be apolitical: the very essence of contemporary “liberalism” (that is, statism) is to pressure and deconstruct Constitutional limits on the powers granted the federal government, and everything from the “Living Constitution”-view of what comes to count as legitimate legal “interpretation” to the idea that it is the role of the courts to promote “social justice” (rather than to to interpret and apply the law, or decide on the legitimacy of legislation under constraints laid out in the Constitution or, sadly, through precedent — which, if the precedent is itself based on bad law and bad judicial reasoning, allows for the institutionalization of a kind of disease that runs through the body politic; this being precisely the reason I’ve been an advocate of libertarian justices, who seem more willing to buck bad precedent than do conservative justices, who are over-accommodating to the supposed wisdom of their predecessors, and rely on stare decisis to avoid re-consideration of “settled” legal questions) is anathema to the Constitution’s original intent to limit the power and scope of the federal government and to enshrine protections for a set of unalienable rights for the individual.

Statism is in the very strictest sense anti-Constitutional. Or, if you wish to be kind, extra-Constitutional, which really amounts to the same thing.

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