Reign Supreme

Amy Welborn's blog has a moderately interesting thread going today about the supreme court and constitutional law, which was touched off by Bishop Skylstad's letter to President Bush about the current Supreme Court vacancy.

I watched the news about this a bit from out hotel room on Friday night (right after O'Connor sent her letter of resignation) and I hope to have a good deal more content coming soon on the coming SCOTUS nomination fight -- as I'm sure it will be.

As seen in the the linked thread, the conflict won't be as simple as liberal vs. conservative, since there are rather more sides (even just to the pro-life question) than that. For instance, we will see at least rhetorical if not political friction between hard core originalists and hard core pro-lifers. A certain segment of the pro-life movement feels that since judicial fiat is how abortion was legalized, we might as well ban it by judicial fiat as well. They would like to see a reversal of Roe v. Wade that outright bans abortion by finding protection for unborn life in the constitution (generally sighting "penumbras and emanations" of the 14th amendment.) Strict originalists, on the other hand, (such as justice Scalia) would like someday to see Roe v. Wade struck down on the grounds that the constitution is currently silent on abortion, and regulation of abortion thus reverted to the states.

I think a state by state war would actually be best for the pro-life movement, both because it would result in a number of separate solutions to the abortion problem (and thus a chance for one state to learn from another) and also because it would present small, achievable objectives. Within a decade or two we would have abortion states and life state and ones that were fuzzy in between (not unlike the slave vs. free states before the civil war) and population/demographic trends would have a chance to re-align the balance of power in the House (at least) based on the relative populations of those states.

More to come.