Source: https://www.lawliberty.org/author/david-upham/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 06:33:10+00:00

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David Upham is associate professor of politics at the University of Dallas.
To qualify as a “privilege” or “immunity” of U.S. citizenship, the right must be both fundamental to citizenship and have a long history.
Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance?
Like Judge Carswell before him, Judge Richard Posner is one of the very few Americans honored with a lifetime appointment to the federal courts of appeal. And like Judge Carswell, Judge Posner is one of the even smaller minority ever considered for (though never appointed to) the Supreme Court.
I write to note my disagreement with their certitude, but tentative agreement with their conclusion.
Some fans of Justice Sonia Sotomayor have recently dubbed her “the people’s justice.” But if her dissent in Schuette v. BAMN is any indication, she doesn’t seem to really like the actual people. And unfortunately for popular government, her colleagues on the bench do not seem very friendly either.
In Schuette, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution did not prohibit the people of Michigan from adopting a constitutional amendment banning governmental racial discrimination, including racial preferences. The Court’s decision overturned a Sixth Circuit decision invalidating the ban.
In a pending case, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, the Supreme Court faces the claim that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits Michigan and every other state from including, within its constitution, a prohibition on any state racial discrimination, even if such discrimination might favor a racial minority. Several briefs, including a brief filed by 76 professional historians, present evidence allegedly supporting this contention.
Some conservative commentators have decried the Windsor case as the new Roe v. Wade. As to legal doctrine, however, the case looks more like a reversal of Harris v. McRae, the Supreme Court decision (barely) upholding the constitutionality of the Hyde Amendment. Further, the case looks like a vindication of the concurring federalist arguments once offered by Justices Catron and Campbell in Dred Scott.
Both Harris and Windsor involved a constitutional challenge, under the Fifth Amendment, to a federal law that affected a due-process right the Court had recently created: the right to abortion, created in Roe v. Wade, and the right to consensual acts of “intimacy,” created in Lawrence v. Texas. Both of those cases were the alleged progeny of the prior due-process cases supporting certain unenumerated, non-economic rights: from Meyer v. Nebraska to Pierce v. Society of Sisters to Griswold v. Connecticut.
In both cases, the federal law involved not criminal prohibition but the distribution of federal benefits in a selective manner that arguably disfavored the exercise of these rights. Moreover, in both cases, the laws were proposed by Republicans, many of whom denied there was any such “right,” for such rights were actually wrongs. In both cases, then, there was some moral disapprobation involved (though probably far more in the case of the Hyde Amendment, for inflammatory words like “murder” were used). In both cases, conversely, the laws were signed by Democratic presidents who affirmed the existence of the alleged constitutional rights, but who believed the federal government did not need to subsidize these rights equally with alternatives.

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