Plato's Guardian - Sandra Day

In next week's edition of Newsweek, Evan Thomas and Stuart Taylor, Jr. pen their ode to O'Connor. The piece leaves me teetering between hysterical laughter and head-shaking consternation. In summary, T&T characterize the Justice as:

Plato's Guardian... doing the right thing to protect the less enlightened from their own faults and shortcomings.

Pure elitist dribble. I'll leave their notion of the "right thing" alone for a minute and focus on Mrs. O'Connor's role as the guiding-light savior to us mere mortals.... Please. The sheer arrogance reeks of the kind of self-congratulatory and pompous B.S. that you expect from an enclave of second year doctoral candidates, sitting around sipping lattes and discussing the obscure layers of Emmanuel Kant, Hegelian dialectics, and the hidden, "self-evident" truths of their haughty gnosticism. Or, maybe even from the self-important snoots at The New Yorker - but Newsweek? This is the typical statist-apparatchik view that but for the counsel of benevolent elites and the cradle-to-grave handholding of their beloved leviathan, we would all face a miserable and unfulfilling life as we ignorantly damn ourselves through unenlightened pursuits. Oh, what fools are we to desire autonomy and, gasp..., freedom? I digress. Putting aside T&T's Platonic anointment of Justice O'Connor as the very personification of a judicial straitjacket - maternally protecting the masses from themselves, I am most appalled by their conception of the "right thing." Thomas and Taylor write:

Justice, [O'Connor] embodied an equally endangered species: the moderate establishment progressive, a centrist in an age of ever-edgier extremes... She was a deep believer in a sensible center, in humane compromise, in finding ways to defuse quarrels and sand down bitter edges.

OK, take a deep breath. Smell that? It's the musty odor of stagnant, saturated mush. I am confident that this is the very stench that has been seeping under the door of the Justice's chambers since 1981. Someone should have suggested some Bounty dryer sheets and a PVC pipe - it worked in the dorms. O'Connor is canonized in the pages of Newsweek because of her "centrist" tendencies and a willingness to "compromise." Maybe I am deluding myself, but I am quite sure that jurists are NOT supposed to compromise. Legislators compromise. Market participants compromise. When my girlfriend and I visit Blockbuster, we compromise. Judges interpret and apply written law. Those words have an objective meaning that do not lend themselves to negotiation and compromise. Here, T&T honor Justice O'Connor for her Judge Judy-like inclination to focus on end-results, usually aligned with her oscillating vision of justice and the popular will -- all at the expense of consistent application of the law and any remnant of an interpretive philosophy. T&T call this "judicial independence." I call it a lack of principles. Ayn Rand was fond of dubbing an act of compromise as, "moral treason" -- surrendering or watering-down one's fundamental beliefs when it seems most expedient. Perhaps. Or, more likely, perhaps O'Connor simply found that the road to elitist acceptance was paved with the abandonment of a consistent and principled ideology. Plato's Guardian, indeed.

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