The great judge Robert Bork wrote things that, despite being obviously true, nevertheless need to be stated often. One was that a law, to be a law, must mean the same thing from one day to the next. It’s almost tautological to say law requires a fixed meaning; how else can it be applied equally? That’s why we say a law is set in stone or is ironclad or immutable.
Such truisms need repeating because the idea is disputed. The notion is under ceaseless assault for political purposes. If fixed words can mean different things, courts don’t adjudicate law but debate politics. That’s what the Supreme Court’s textualists want to prevent.
The Left and its four adherents on the high court instead subscribe to a chimera called the “living Constitution.” It allows its devotees to say that words mean whatever facilitates the liberal political agenda. That’s how we got the constitutional right to abortion, which plainly does not exist.
Textualists, of whom Chief Justice Roberts is the leader (if not the most relentless proponent), are about to be plunged into a political maelstrom that their judicial philosophy abhors. In our cover story, “Sucked Under,” reporter Melissa Quinn lays out the nightmare that impeachment means for Roberts. Only constitutional and nonpolitical decisions can command respect, so Roberts has tried ever since he became chief justice in 2005 to preserve the institution he runs by steering it away from Capitol Hill controversies.
This has, of course, proved impossible, for constitutional law has been poisoned, perhaps irredeemably, in the past 30 years by ideological wars. Almost no one is any longer willing to wait for a high court ruling, or doubt what it should be, or accept it if it isn’t as desired.
Roberts seems certain soon to preside over the most political thing on the planet — the impeachment of a sitting president. He knows that his every raised eyebrow, inflection of the head, or involuntary twitch will be beamed out on prime-time TV and interpreted by pundits speculating to fill airtime.
When we talk of the dogs of war, Shakespeare’s ringing phrase conjures up savage mythical embodiments of warfare itself. But reporter Russ Read takes a look at real, living dogs who go to war. Dogs at war are of renewed interest since Conan, a Belgian Malinois, recently cornered Abu Bakar al Baghdadi, caliph of the Islamic State, before the world’s No. 1 terrorist was killed by U.S. forces. Dogs of war are really a warrior’s best friend.
Elsewhere, Eric Felten ponders the peculiar fact that we wear our cars the way we wear our clothes; they define who we are. I think of Eric as an archetypal Audi driver, but, between the damnation and redemption of his rented Ram truck, he loads a 5-liter Mustang convertible like the Grinch piling pilfered Christmas gifts onto his sled.
