Supremely capricious

April 16, 2008 at 11:07 pm (Civil Rights)

Naturally, I was a little disappointed by today’s ruling on the Baze case although it wasn’t unexpected.  I was happy to read Stevens’ “pointless and needless” statement, but naturally found out quickly that he (along with Harry Blackmun, who also criticized the death penalty at the end of his career) voted with the majority on Gregg v. Georgia in 1976.

Ahh, the life of a Supreme Court judge: forced to agree (or disagree) against one’s principles simply because the case you are deciding deals only with a tiny aspect of a larger issue.  In a way, decisions like this seem to confirm the integrity of the system.  But how frustrating!  How is real change to be effected from the margins?  I suppose that’s why we have legislators.

I enjoyed reading Blackmun’s comments from Callins v. Collins and so I’ll include a snippet:

From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than twenty years I have endeavored—indeed, I have struggled—along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor.1 Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.

Skimming the history of death penalty decisions since 1976 confirms Blackmun’s view–we’re still tweaking things.  In the meantime, public support has been declining (although in some polls less than others) since 1992, where it peaked after more than 20 years of rising.  Support is still probably too high to support widescale change, but it’s vulnerable–whereas people typically have deeply entrenched views about issues with strong moral implications, it feels as though people are very much on the fence with this issue.  Hey, some places in this country force schools to put “In God We Trust” on their walls.  Surely the death penalty makes some of these same people uncomfortable.

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The dummy candidate

April 14, 2008 at 11:30 pm (Media)

It’s astounding to me how important words can be.  Because Barack Obama used big words in Pennsylvania, suddenly he is an “elitist,” even compared to Hillary Clinton and John McCain!  We must have a real fear of issues if this is a bigger issue to the Clinton campaign than Obama’s rather poor choice of words in demonstrating his support for reality-based sex-ed.

But ok, I’ll bite.  The truth is, I actually would kind of like a President who is smarter than I am and who is not afraid to show it.  And look, I’ve never fully bought into the Bush-as-idiot line (not that I haven’t wondered at times).  But that old metric, “Who would you rather have a beer with?” is way off.  It appears that there are people–ones who aren’t supposed to understand big words like “antipathy”–who are actually just as insulted that other elitist Presidential candidates think they might be intimidated by such language.  This is good news (if it’s widespread).  Perhaps we’ve come to our senses with regard to the whole regular-guy-as-President thing.  It really hasn’t been working out.

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