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When Is a Litmus Test Not a Litmus Test?
2008 Presidential Election, National Politics, Politics Comments (1)
Apparently when Bill Richardson is trying to find a Supreme Court nominee. According to theDallas Morning News, Richardson “said he would ask potential nominees whether they believed that privacy, which was a basis for the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision that legalized abortion, is settled law.”
And then I’m going to go one step further. I’m going to ask, do you believe that Roe vs. Wade is settled law? If their answer is no, I’m not going to appoint them.
“The White House hopeful said his position was not a litmus test but an attempt to gauge a nominee’s willingness to respect precedent.”
Uh, no. It, most emphatically, is a litmus test. When you ask a nominee, beforehand, how they will vote on a case (with no consideration of any other facts surrounding the case), then that would be a litmus test. It would also be a certain way to garner the vote of a Richardson appointee. Just make sure to make your case turn on Roe.
My position on Roe isn’t difficult to figure out. I think it was poor case law. The Supreme Court created a right, whole-cloth, from a penumbral right — the concept of which was first discovered in 1964’s Griswold v. Connecticut. Before that, the decision as to whether to allow abortion had been a state issue under the 10th Amendment.
I have to admit that I’m one of those terrible, evil people who believe that life begins at conception and that the woman’s right to choose happens at the same time as the man’s right to choose: when they choose to engage in act that causes conception. And yes, I know that there are edge cases here, like rape and incest, but they are just that: edge cases that account for less than 1% of abortions.
But even at that, I realize that good, honest people are going to disagree over this issue. My biggest concern here is that we have a Presidential nominee who thinks that a litmus test isn’t a litmus test, and that getting assurances from judicial nominees about how they will decide specific legal challenges is the way to go.
MickC @ September 13, 2007
A better litmus test would be:
“Do you think edge cases (or “corner cases” as I prefer do call them) should be the determinants for laws that purport to cover all cases?”
Or somnething like that.