Today I came across two blog posts on Sanctification, and my question is, are these views mutually exclusive? Here’s Pr. McCain’s post (along with this one), and here’s Monergon’s post at Theomony. This is an absolutely necessary discussion, lest we lose all the ground to purpose-driven lives, churches, businesses, marriages…hmm, do you think they can make a hybrid car that runs on gas and purpose? Or maybe electricity and purpose? They’ll have to check into that one…
Day: 10 January 2006
Somebody Slap Sen. Kennedy (and Schumer and Feinstein…)
(See, it’s a free country. I can say that and no one is going to arrest me. Just like Sen. Kennedy can make unfounded and unsupportable–unsupportable because they pretend to know the motives of a man–assertions about the President and no one will arrest him.)
I was watching some of the Alito hearings, and I think it’s a smart move–Chief Justice Roberts did it too–to just let Sen. Kennedy make an idiot of himself as he rants on and on about Pres. Bush. One lesson we should learn: whenever Sen. Kennedy says, “The President in essence is saying…”, everyone should know that an exaggerated assertion is coming.
Sen. Kennedy, is there a question somewhere in all that expectoration? And when Judge Alito answers your question (far more intelligently than you asked it, by the way), will you accept it or just continue on with your agenda as if he never answered it at all? Oh, the latter? Well, if that’s the way you want it.
More on the hearings: I think it’s an absolute absurdity when senators like Feinstein will choose how to vote based on what Alito believes about abortion. How is it suddenly an inalienable right inherent in the Supreme Court that there must be ideological balance on the court? I’m not good at math, but I’m pretty sure nine is not equally divisible into two halves.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., told Alito that he has a triple burden to clear before he can be confirmed. That includes proving that he won’t swing “the fulcrum of the court” to the right by replacing the moderate O’Connor and that he is more than just a darling of the conservatives.
Equal division into “right” and “left,” “liberal” and “conservative,” is a fiction made up by those who want to tip the ideological scales toward their own pet issues (largely beholden to the pro-death lobby in this country). Incidentally, Schumer made another hilarious statement when he said: “You give the impression of being a meticulous legal navigator, but, in the end, you always seem to chart a rightward course.” See, this just can’t be right. Judge Alito, you seem to be meticulous when it comes to the law; why, then, do you always end up on the right side of American opinion? Good question. Perhaps because meticulous legal navigation leads to a “rightward course”?
Filling O’Connor’s seat is a “pivotal appointment,” since she was the fifth vote on 148 cases, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., telling Alito, “you well could be a very key and decisive vote.”
“And so, during these hearings, I think it’s fair for us to try to determine whether your legal reasoning is in the mainstream of American legal thought and whether you’re going to follow the law regardless of your personal feelings on the law,” Feinstein said. “I very much hope you will be straightforward with us — share your thinking and show your legal reasoning.”
A “very key and decisive vote,” huh? What kind of logic–if one should be so charitable–is at work here? Clearly, if Alito is the tie-breaking vote one way or the other, his will be a key and decisive vote. Feinstein doesn’t care about that. She cares whether his will be her kind of key and decisive vote. Further, she assumes that her position is the one “in the mainstream of American legal thought” (which it may well be); even if it is, since when does the opinion of a majority of lawyers determine the correctness or stability of a law? Even if Alito “shares” his thinking and shows his legal reasoning, does anyone really think that people like Feinstein are all of a sudden going to embrace him? Nah. This is politics with blinders at its most apparent. Do Kennedy, Schumer, and Feinstein have any interest in actually hearing Alito’s legal reasoning? No, because even if it is “meticulous,” it might chart a “rightward course.” And then where would we be? At a “key and decisive vote.” That’s what they cannot handle. If this were a Democratic president nominating an openly and unabashedly pro-abortion justice, there would be no question on which side these senators would fall: [with solemn voice:] “we are looking at someone who will impartially and fairly interpret the settled law of the land.”
Here’s to a “very key and decisive vote” that grants parental notification, an end to partial-birth abortion, and, finally, an end to federally sanctioned murder. Give the key and decisive vote to the people in each state to decide and we will see very clearly what the American mainstream (sorry senators, that means outside NYC, the Beltway, and Los Angeles) believes about abortion.
Balaam's Ass 