Points to Ponder Archive
Points to Ponder is a new and regular feature of Observations, and consists of thoughts that I find meaningful and important. This file has been created as a place to store these thoughts. The most recent thought is first.
I’m from Texas. In Texas we have the death penalty. And we USE it. That’s right. If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back. That’s our policy.
They’re trying to pass a bill right now through the Texas Legislature that will speed up the process of execution in heinous crimes where there’s more than three credible eyewitnesses. If more than three people saw you do what you did, you don’t sit on death row for 15 years, Jack; you go straight to the front of the line.
Other states are trying to abolish the death penalty … my state is putting in an express lane.
August 10, 2005
The Establishment Clause did not require government neutrality between religion and irreligion nor did it prohibit the Federal Government from providing nondiscriminatory aid to religion. There is simply no historical foundation for the proposition that the Framers intended to build the “wall of separation” that was constitutionalized in Everson [vs. Board of Education] …
… The “wall of separation between church and State” is a metaphor based on bad history, a metaphor which has proved useless as a guide to judging. It should be frankly and explicitly abandoned.
August 1, 2005
What is evident in the rethinking that has been going on about social problems and policies in recent years is the bankruptcy of the theories and practices that have prevailed for the past half-century or more. Just as nineteenth-century reformers consciously sought to fashion social policies in accord with moral objectives, so their successors tried, just as consciously, to divorce social policies from any suspicion of morality.
In part, this reflects the assumption that society is responsible for all social problems and therefore has the task of solving them, and in part the prevailing spirit of relativism, which finds it distasteful to pass moral judgments upon others, let alone impose moral conditions upon them. After decades of cultivating such a “nonjudgmental” philosophy, we are beginning to discover that all policies, for good or ill, have moral consequences, and that only by deliberately devising policies in accord with desirable ends can the good outweigh the bad.
- Gertrude Himmelfarb, Page 75, One Nation, Two Cultures
July 26, 2005
It is presumptuous and insulting to suggest that a whole region of the world – or the one-fifth of humanity that is Muslim – is somehow untouched by the most basic aspirations of life.
Human cultures can be vastly different. Yet the human heart desires the same good things, everywhere on Earth. In our desire to be safe from brutal and bullying oppression, human beings are the same. In our desire to care for our children and give them a better life, we are the same. For these fundamental reasons, freedom and democracy will always and everywhere have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the tactics of terror.July 21, 2005
The Bush paradox rests on a misapprehension – one shared by American journalists and intellectuals from Tom Paine through Henry Adams and H. L. Mencken, right on up to, well, Frank Bruni and much of today’s Washington press corps. Gazing down on their subject from Olympian heights, reporters wonder why the gifts of the intellectual – for language and rumination and subtlety – aren’t indispensable to the exercise of power. And indeed they aren’t. Leadership requires will, self-confidence, and moral clarity. These Bush has in abundance. And the best bet is that he will continue to demonstrate them, day by day, even as his intellectual superiors puzzle over their self-made paradox.
July 14, 2005
The greatest moral imperative we face is replacing the welfare state with an opportunity society. For every day that we allow the current conditions to continue, we are condemning the poor – and particularly poor children – to being deprived of their basic rights as Americans. The welfare state reduces the poor from citizens to clients. It breaks up families, minimizes work incentives, blocks people from saving and acquiring property, and overshadows dreams of a promised future with a present despair born of poverty, violence, and hopelessness.
- Newt Gingrich
July 9, 2005
The separation of powers means not only that judges should stay out of policy issues that belong to legislative bodies but also that the Senate should respect the judicial branch and not try to predetermine how judges will rule on legal issues.
What Senate liberals of both parties want to do is extract some kind of commitment that judicial nominees will not reverse Roe v. Wade. Judicial nominees should not be chosen by the President to reverse Roe v. Wade or rejected by the Senate if they don't pledge to uphold it. Respect for the Constitutional separation of powers should apply to all three branches of government.
July 6, 2005
“The Consititution does not constitute us as ‘Platonic Guardians’ nor does it vest in this Court the authority to strike down laws because they do not meet our standards of desirable social policy, ‘wisdom,’ or ‘common sense.’ … We trespass on the assigned function of the political branches under our structure of limited and separated powers when we assume a policymaking role.”
Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202, 242 (1982)
July 2, 2005
Many law professors, and others who hold contempt for our Constitution, preach that the Constitution is a living document. Saying that the Constitution is a living document is the same as saying we don't have a Constitution. For rules to mean anything, they must be fixed. How many people would like to play me poker and have the rules be "living"? Depending on "evolving standards," maybe my two pair could beat your flush.
The framers recognized there might come a time to amend the Constitution, and they gave us Article V as a means for doing so. Early in the last century, some Americans thought it was a good idea to ban the manufacture and sale of alcohol. They didn't go to court asking the justices to twist the Constitution to accomplish their goal. They respected the Constitution and sought passage of the 18th Amendment.
The founders were right about a lot of things, but they were dead wrong when they bought into Alexander Hamilton's Federalist Paper No. 78 prediction that the judiciary was the "least dangerous" branch of government.
June 21, 2005
When our military fighting overseas, at the height of active hostilities, grants quarter by apprehending rather than destroying the forces arrayed against it, those forces, those alien enemies trying to kill Americans – alien enemies who secret themselves among civilians; who use humanitarian infrastructure like ambulances, hospitals and schools to carry out their grisly business; who make a mockery of the laws and conventions of civilized warfare; who torture and kill their captives with a bestiality that defies description; whose only contact with America is to regard her with this savagery – have resort to the courts of the United States to protest their detention and to compel the executive branch, while it is conducting battle, to explain itself. Just to describe this breathtaking claim of entitlement should be to refute it.
- Andrew C. McCarthy, former federal prosecutor
Highly qualified judicial nominees are waiting years to get an up-or-down vote from the United States Senate. They wait for years while partisans search in vain for reasons to reject them. The obstructionist tactics of a small group of senators are setting a pattern that threatens judicial independence. Meanwhile, vacancies on the bench and overcrowded court dockets are causing delays for citizens seeking justice. The judicial confirmation process is broken, and it must be fixed for the good of the country.
- President George W. Bush, May 9, 2003
But it must also be said that while Watergate and "All the President's Men" briefly turned journalists into heroes, they may have contributed to the long-term credibility problems of the profession. Too many journalists became sloppy with anonymous sources, some of whom didn't have first-hand knowledge of what they were talking about, and some reporters tried to pump every two-bit scandal into a "-gate." Having been lied to by the Nixon White House, journalists became more confrontational, more prosecutorial and more willing to assume that politicians must be lying. And the news business is still paying the price for some of those excesses.
- Howard Kurtz
The litigious temper of the times is a consequence of the decline of civility and the concomitant proliferation of “rights” – legal rights in place of the manners and morals that once arbitrated disagreements and disputes.
In this sense the law has become not so much the aid and abettor of manners and morals as a substitute for them.
- Gertrude Himmelfarb
Opponents of welfare have always said that welfare is degrading, both to the giver and the recipient. They have said that it destroys self-respect, that it lowers incentives, that it is contrary to American ideals.
Most of us deprecated and disregarded these criticisms. People were in need; obviously, we felt, to help people in trouble was the right thing to do.
But in our urge to help, we also disregarded elementary fact. For the criticisms of welfare do have a center of truth, and they are confirmed by the evidence.
Recent studies have shown, for example, that higher welfare payments often encourage students to drop out of school, that they encourage families to disintegrate, and that they often lead to lifelong dependency.
- Robert F. Kennedy
“Continued dependence upon relief induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.”
– President Franklin Roosevelt,
commenting less than two years after
the start of the federal relief program
posted by James Shott at 4:36 PM
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