Sen. McCain Explains His Judicial Philosophy:
A Thoughtful Primer on the Need for Restraint and
More Justices Such as Roberts and Alito -- Part One of Two

Editor's note. I do hope you also have time to read Part Two, which is the full text of Sen. McCain's outstanding speech. Please send me your observations at daveandrusko@hotmail.com.

Over the course of the next 24 hours, you will hear and read a lot about the speech pro-life Sen. John McCain delivered today at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Take most of what is said and written about it with a pound of salt.

Most of the commentary will be the usual--the dumbing down of an extremely thoughtful and carefully crafted speech. Take the time to read for yourself what Sen. McCain said constitutes the judicial philosophy that will guide his appointments to the Supreme Court and to all the federal courts. For your convenience, I've included the entirety of Sen. McCain's remarks in Part Two.

This is an important speech. It was not an "olive branch" extended to the "far right," as the Associated Press so predictably described it.

The address to Wake Forest students was instead an exceptionally thoughtful explication both of the core tenets of Sen. McCain's judicial philosophy and of the dangers presented to a democracy when judges and justices choose to untether their jurisprudence from the Constitution.

McCain distinguished his philosophy from that of pro-abortion Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, particularly the latter. Both opposed the confirmation of the kinds of justices McCain said he would nominate as President: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito. McCain cited the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist, along with Roberts and Alito, as "jurists of the highest caliber who know their own minds, and know the law, and know the difference."

In a sense, honing in on Obama was almost unavoidable, given what the junior senator from Illinois said in explaining what he was looking for in a justice. Obama said of a justice of the court that he/she should share "one's deepest values, one's core concerns, one's broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one's empathy."

Such content-free, Constitution-free inanities are a recipe for judicial activism on steroids. The following riveting paragraph distills where McCain is coming from and why Obama [and Clinton] are so dangerous.

"These vague words attempt to justify judicial activism – come to think of it, they sound like an activist judge wrote them," McCain said. "And whatever they mean exactly, somehow Senator Obama's standards proved too lofty a standard for a nominee who was brilliant, fair-minded, and learned in the law, a nominee of clear rectitude who had proved more than the equal of any lawyer on the Judiciary Committee, and who today is respected by all as the Chief Justice of the United States. Somehow, by Senator Obama's standard, even Judge Roberts didn't measure up. And neither did Justice Samuel Alito. Apparently, nobody quite fits the bill except for an elite group of activist judges, lawyers, and law professors who think they know wisdom when they see it – and they see it only in each other."

In expressing his staunch opposition to judicial activism, McCain also contrasted this legislating from the bench from genuine activism in a democracy.

Real activism in our country, he said, "is democratic. Real activists seek to make their case democratically -- to win hearts, minds, and majorities to their cause. Such people throughout our history have often shown great idealism and done great good. By contrast, activist lawyers and activist judges follow a different method. They want to be spared the inconvenience of campaigns, elections, legislative votes, and all of that.

"They don't seek to win debates on the merits of their argument; they seek to shut down debates by order of the court. And even in courtrooms, they apply a double standard. Some federal judges operate by fiat, shrugging off generations of legal wisdom and precedent while expecting their own opinions to go unquestioned. Only their favorite precedents are to be considered 'settled law,' and everything else is fair game."

Please take the time to read Sen. McCain's entire speech which is reproduced in Part Two. It will help you to understand why he strenuously opposes Roe v. Wade, the very epitome of the kind of judicial activism McCain abhors.

Part Two