A nation of laws written by man

It’s that Platonic thing again. Somewhere there are ideal triangles and horses, and laws and constitutions, but we are all in Plato’s cave and from there we can only glimpse them dimly. If we could break our chains and get out into the light and find the laws that were clear and logical and not contradictory we could make sure that everybody was treated fairly. But we can’t so this is a nation of laws (written by man).

God was nice enough to write on those tablets for Moses to carry down to the Israelites, but since then hasn’t gone to any great lengths to make it clear what exactly He wants from us, so that is left for dull scholars tracing fingers down the pages of dusty books, and trying to figure out what exactly did He mean by say, not killing, surely there are times when the only thing the enemy understands is force, and not covet my neighbor’s wife, how can I help that when she goes sun bathing in that teeny weeny bikini?

And the thing is, being mere man, we have to use words to write the constitution and words are so slippery and they change over time, and in order not to bore people to death they have to be written pretty generally, and then people disagree on what they mean. Take the second amendment, do you think we have reached the point of calm reasonableness where we could discuss that again?

We can’t let people interpret the laws for themselves, we might just as well have no laws. So we have judges, and in principle they are just weighers of truth, just human scales, put so much bullshit in this cup, so much in the other, see which way the thing bends, but of course they are just men and some of them are pretty bad.

Here in Chicago, the home of good gummint, we vote for our judges, and surely you would think if they are selected by the populace, surely no scoundrel could get onto the bench. But what it is, is a list of like fifty people at the end of the ballot and if you’re Irish you vote for the Irish name, and if you are Polish you vote for the Polish name.

I may be wrong here (but how often does that happen), but it seems like in our youth, the selection of supreme court judges was kind of a routine affair, the president chose some guy who was generally the middle of the road, and the congress approved and life went on.

It seems to me that the big change came with Bork. Naturally conservative icon RR wanted to choose a conservative judge, but sometimes those guys turned out to be liberal once they got on the court, so he chose Bork who was so far right that there was hardly a chance he would ever turn liberal, and this upset the dems and they, well they borked him, and since then it has become a big battle every time there is an opening on the supreme court and the prez doesn’t control both houses. Seems to me that the republicans propose far more extreme candidates then the dems, but be that as it may, the supreme court, the third leg of our gummint, is now run by a throw of the dice, a prez may get to select none or he may get to select many depending on who dies or quits during his reign. And you have to nominate relative unknowns who have no paper trail, and when they are being grilled by congress they act like a crook interrogated by the cops, they don’t have any opinions and don’t know nothing.

You know I really should know more about the supreme court. But it sounds so Goddamn boring. I should find a good book.a