Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Left, the Right, and the Constitution


NRO ^ | 6/27/2012 | Yuval Levin



Whatever decision the Supreme Court announces on Obamacare tomorrow, the various liberal missives of anticipatory anxiety in recent days have already revealed a great deal about the Left’s attitude toward our constitutional system. What we’ve learned can hardly come as news to conservatives, but it has been put forward in an unusually clear and undiluted form, and so is worth some thought....
The basic message of these left-leaning diatribes is pretty simple: A majority of the Court could only disagree with liberals about whether requiring all Americans to buy health insurance is beyond the proper bounds of the Congress’s power to regulate commerce if that majority acted in a purely political or partisan way; there is no room for disagreement regarding the actual interpretation of the actual Constitution.
[....]
It would be easy to criticize all this for its sheer unselfconscious lack of seriousness: These people are actually saying that any outcome except the one they want must be driven by an outcome-oriented political crusade. Only their view could result from an actual engagement with the question before the Court, and any other view could only be a function of corruption or of cynicism. It must be nice to be so enlightened.
[....]
[Liberals] imply that there ought to be no connection between the most basic political divisions that define our public life—crudely encompassed in the Left/Right division—and ways of understanding the Constitution. This is a profound mistake, and a very telling one. As the Left often does, they underplay the substantive seriousness and significance of the Left/Right divide, presumably because they do not think of themselves as possessed of a particular worldview and believe they are merely objectively analyzing the obvious realities of the world around us. But there’s much more than they think to the Left/Right divide.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...

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