Response: Activist Judges Merely Applying Law?!

On Wednesday, Justice Stephen Reinhardt of the 9th Circuit Court, while participating in a discussion at Pepperdine law School explicitly ridiculed right wing values. To think there are no activist judges is hyper-naive.

You stated that "so-called" activist judges are merely applying the law as intended by our founding fathers? Well, in which cases and which founding fathers. Some founding fathers were very opposed to the federal government while others were very much in favor of it.

Additionally, framer's intent is nebulous at best. Take the separation of church and state clause…oh wait a minute—that language was never used in the Constitution, yet somehow these judges are merely applying the law as the authors suggested.

Well, what did they say: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

So let’s see, prayer is outlawed in public schools because Courts made the interpreted that that since tax dollars fund public schools they are in turn institutions of the state and therefore teachers are employees of the state and therefore a teacher asking his or her students to pray is, in essence, instituting a rule, or say a law for the sake of constitutionality, that respects an establishment of religion and unconstitutionally alienates those students who are not of that religion who choose to not participate

Well, to borrow from science, specifically Occam’s razor, which states, “that one should make no more assumptions than needed. When multiple explanations are available for a phenomenon, the simplest version is preferred,” it would seem that maybe a simpler explanation works here—they’re manipulating the Constitution to fit an anti-religious social agenda.

A public school is not tantamount to Congress! And what about that whole “free exercise” clause that always gets overlooked. When Chief Justice Roy Moore was ordered to remove the 10 commandments from the courthouse in which he presided, his Constitutional rights were being violated.

The first amendment specifically refers to Congress and as all first-graders know the Judicial and Congressional branches are separate. Judge Moore is a free citizen of the United States and as such is free to express his views. He has every right in the world to display a symbol of the values that underlie his judicial philosophy. But no, he was stripped of the right to express himself by a court straying from what the Constitution actually says. Yet, somehow that equates to a fair application of law in accordance with the framer’s intent, but textualism is somehow radically conservative??