Judging Judges

"According to the story, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Pat Leahy's political strategy will be offered up in a simple question: "Do you share our concern about the fact that the court always seems to side with the big corporate interests against the average American?"
"...what Leahy is really asking is this: Do you share our concern that the Constitution, too often interpreted as written, is holding back an empathetic and enlightened progressive agenda?"

"So Leahy, who believes Stevens is a model jurist, likely will ask many piercing questions (How evil is corporate America, Nixon evil or merely Nazi evil?) in defense of average Americans.But I wonder whether the average American believes, like Justice Stevens, that an unelected federal agency, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, should bypass Congress and, by fiat, regulate carbon dioxide, a chemical compound that permeates everything, without any consideration for cost or imposition or the electorate?  Do most average Americans, like Justice Stevens -- who dissented on the landmark Second Amendment case of District of Columbia v. Heller -- believe that once a judge deems something dangerous enough, that judge should empower government to ban it, even though that something happens to be explicitly protected by a constitutional amendment?  Do they believe, like Justice Stevens, that local government should be permitted to throw American citizens off their own property and out of their homes? Do they concur that government should then be able to hand that property over to other private citizens simply because they can pay more taxes? Because, in Kelo v. City of New London, Stevens, writing for the majority, radically expanded the idea of property as "public use.""

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/04/14/senate_v_the_constitution_105165.html at April 14, 2010 - 02:57:00 PM