STAY EXILED

Via Eschaton comes this excellent and informative blog post from Stephen Kaus over at the Huffington Post. SCOTUS nominee Samual Alito is one of these Federalist Society, Constitution-in-Exile ultraconservative judicial activists. If these jokers had their way, not only would SCOTUS strike down civil rights and abortion rights precedents, but also would eviscerate settled law to bring us back to a neo-Gilded Age era with wage slaves and robber barons:

Richard Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor described by Rosen as the “intellectual guru” of the CIE movement, believes such things as zoning, workers compensation laws and progressive taxation are unconstitutional takings. Minimum wage laws and environmental laws also apparently are not allowed under the CIE. The CIE grail is Lockner v. New York, a 1905 case that struck down a law setting a maximum number of hours for bakers as interfering with the bakers’ freedom to contract. This all changed in 1937 and since then, the Court has largely restrained itself from interfering in Congress’s regulation of economic matters.

Far from wanting to avoid “legislating from the bench,” the CIE crowd wants the Court to strike down federal regulations. Rosen points out that from 1995 through 2003, the Rehnquist Court struck down 33 federal laws as unconstitutional, which he says is a record. The best-known battles were over the commerce clause, which once appeared to give the federal government power over almost anything. In 1995 and 2000, the Court ruled that federal laws regulating guns in school and violence against women, respectively, were unconstitutional, as their subjects did not have enough to do with interstate commerce.

This is the enemy. Know the enemy, and be prepared to fight.

JC