Today's Must Reads

Today's George Will column brings to attention that the next president will most likely be making some very important judicial appointments. The matter went undiscussed in the debates.

"Wednesday, (the last debate) as in the rest of the campaign, the presidential power to shape the federal judiciary received remarkably little attention. Any president who serves two terms likely will replace half that judiciary; Bush already has replaced one-quarter. But he is about to become the second president (Carter was the first) to serve a full term without filling a Supreme Court vacancy. It has been 10 years since a new justice (Breyer) was confirmed; not since 1812-1823, when the court had only seven members, has it gone that long unchanged. Bush's second term could be dominated by nomination battles: Chief Justice Rehnquist just turned 80 and the average age of the nine justices is 70.

Liberalism, having lost its ability to advance by persuasion, increasingly relies on litigation. In its flight from arenas of representation, liberalism has used the judiciary as its legislature. Hence the exultation of Ron Brown, then Democratic Party chairman, addressing an American Bar Association forum immediately after the 1992 election: 'My friends, I'm here to tell you that the lawyers won.'"

Check out the entire piece.

Here's a good Dennis Prager piece written last month explaining why the left thinks 'legally' and the right thinks 'morally'. If you haven't read this column, you might want to as it compliments the above George Will piece.

Another must read is Krauthammer's piece, Anything to get elected. By now you know that the Kerry/Edwards ticket is in the market for a large circus tent in which to hold their faith healing campaigns. Krauthammer's own paralysis lends to the pathos in this 'shame on you' piece:

"WASHINGTON -- After the second presidential debate, in which John Kerry used the word ``plan' 24 times, I said on television that Kerry has a plan for everything except curing psoriasis. I should have known there is no parodying Kerry's pandering. It turned out days later that the Kerry campaign has a plan -- nay, a promise -- to cure paralysis. What is the plan? Vote for Kerry.
I'm not making this up. I couldn't. This is John Edwards on Monday at a rally in Newton, Iowa: ``If we do the work that we can do in this country, the work that we will do when John Kerry is president, people like Christopher Reeve are going to walk, get up out of that wheelchair and walk again.''
In my 25 years in Washington, I have never seen a more loathsome display of demagoguery. Hope is good. False hope is bad. Deliberately raising for personal gain false hope in the catastrophically afflicted is despicable."

And then there is William F. Buckley's piece on Kerry's 'outing' comments about Mary Cheney. What was Kerry's intended purpose? Buckley speculates about the ramifications in his inimitable way:

"This will require magnanimity, savoir faire, and intense concentration. The objective: to opine on whether it was correct for Senator Kerry to make references to Mary Cheney as a lesbian. "

Just read it!