Dred Scott

Well, I am glad that has been cleared up. Hear that, everybody, we are against slavery. So if you bring your slave over here and he decides not to go back to the Sudan with you (curious that the nation chairing the UN human rights commission is one of the few left in the world that can still be said to have actual human slavery) don't expect us to catch him and send him back.

Now you see? You complain about all these focus grouped tested, canned answers but when you actually get to see the guy think on his feet what do you get? I mean as inane as the specticle of a US President denouncing slavery in answer to the question of how he would pick future judges (shouldn't we be complaining about litmus tests here?) you can't accuse him of not thinking for himself. This is what he thinks. "What do I think about judges? Well, I certainly don't want any of that Dred Scott sort of nonsense."

There is a serious point about this decision. It is an example of judges using a general principle that is present in the background but not made specific in the Constitution--the idea of property rights--and applying that principle in a novel way to in effect make a new law. This is of course exactly what liberal judges have done in the post-war era to strike down abortion and expand criminal legal protections. As such, bringing up Dred Scott is a sensible thing to do, but Bush just wasn't firm enough in his grasp of the argument to make the connection explicit. So he ends up saying something insipid like, "and people aren't property, so that is just wrong," as if there was someone proposing that they were. Remember this the next time you hear a complaint about politicians having set answers to everything and answering the question they wished they had been asked instead of the one they were asked.

Which brings me to my main impression about this debate. I had the feeling that they really did try to ansswer the questions they were asked. That is why Bush, at least, ends up saying some slightly goofy things. I think part of this is that people justed asked really good questions for the most part. They asked about things that mattered to them and they posed them in a way that really forced the guy to address the nub of the problem. Who needs these journalists, anyway?