The Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal fights another round with the U.S. Supreme Court and in so doing, provides another example of how liberal activist judges are aiding and abetting the liberalists in society—whether of not they’re in power—in achieving their liberal goals.
The exact same kind of thing happens here in our Supreme Court of Canada division of the Liberal Party.
Note that in the U.S., “Blue States” are liberal or Democratic Party-voting states in contradistinction to Canada.
[…] No doubt most Americans will concede that the death penalty for 16- and 17-year-olds is a difficult moral question. That is why different U.S. states have different laws on the matter, and we’d probably oppose such executions if we sat in a legislature. But rather than defer to the will of voters as expressed through state legislatures and at least two ballot initiatives (in Arizona and Florida), Roper imposes the view of five justices that the execution of 16- and 17-year-olds is both wrong and unconstitutional. As Justice Antonin Scalia writes in a dissent that is even more pungent than his usual offerings, “The court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our nation’s moral standards.”
Justice Kennedy rests his decision on his assertion that American society has reached a “national consensus” against capital punishment for juveniles, and that laws allowing it contravene modern “standards of decency.” His evidence for this “consensus” is that of the 38 states that permit capital punishment, 18 have laws prohibiting the execution of murderers under the age of 18. As we do the math, that’s a minority of 47% of those states. The dozen states that have no death penalty offer no views about special immunity for juveniles—and all 12 permit 16- and 17-year-olds to be treated as adults when charged with non-capital offenses.
This idea of invoking state laws to define a “consensus” also runs up against any number of notable Supreme Court precedents, including Roe v. Wade. When Roe was decided in 1973, all 50 states had some prohibition against abortion on the books. But never mind. [… Read the rest (2 minutes) …]
PTBC was founded by Mr. Johannesen in 2000.
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