Another example of why Justice Anthony Kennedy is in the wrong job — he thinks he’s a legislator, not a judge.

What’s the difference? That’s the problem — the differences get more blurred by the day, until the time comes when our legislators spend all of their time campaigning, voicing opinions, and avoiding decisions or votes on legislation (except that legislation that cedes power to other interests or organizations), and thereby avoiding responsibility, while our judges and justices fill the vacuum in areas where they have no reponsibility or accountability at all. 

Justice Kennedy admitted as much today in his opinion outlawing the death penalty for child rape. When he said, ”there is a national consensus against capital punishment for the crime of child rape,” he is admitting that public opinion, and not the law or the Constitution, influenced his decision.

This is preposterous, arrogant, and dicatorial. No one (least of all judges) is qualified or authorized to base decisions on public opinion, even if they knew how. (Legislators think they know how, but they often fail, and lose elections, from which justices are immune.) Public opinion only counts when it expresses itself through democratic institutions and a legal framework. So if several states had abolished capital punishment for child rapists, why does Anthony Kennedy feel that it then becomes necessary for him to force the remaining states to follow along? Is that the job of the Supreme Court? 

A dictator can be loved; he can have his pulse on the people’s will; he can even be right somtimes; but he’s still a dictator.

Anthony Kennedy is loved by academia and elite circles within the Beltway (including some conservatives such as George Will); he has his pulse on their opinions and values and apparently derives satisfaction from being stroked by the editorial pages of the Washington Post and NYT; and he has also stumbled on some correct rulings; but he is still a dictator in the sense that he shamlessly exercises power which is not rightfully or constitutionally his.

Maybe it’s time to start calling the five-justice majority headed by Kennedy as the “ruling junta.”

On June 13th in an Ohio “Town Hall” meeting, Barack Obama explained how he would address the Social Security funding issue (simple: raise taxes) and why his solution (raising taxes) is better than any of the other alternatives. (Which he didn’t bother to mention, which means he didn’t explain anything at all. It’s easy to argue when you only present one side of an argument, isn’t it?)

The problem is, his example for raising FICA taxes isn’t an example at all.

I’ve got a friend in Omaha — you may have heard of him — named Warren Buffett. He’s worth $56 billion. You know, if he’s only paying the first $100,000, that is .000001 percent of his income is he paying Social Security. I may have lost a couple of zeroes in there.

This should be really embarrassing for Obama. Even the most illiterate of wage earners know that the Social Security tax (FICA) isn’t a wealth tax at all, but a payroll tax. And that most really wealthy people like Warren Buffet don’t earn wages at all, but derive their income from non-payroll sources (called “unearned income” by the IRS).

Is Obama proposing a wealth tax? Not likely. Extending the payroll tax to unearned income? Also not likely. Is he ignorant of fedral taxes in general, or just using naked demagoguery in the hope that his listeners are?

Either way, it says an awful lot about the candidate and his followers.

In the Boumediene case decided yesterday, the Supremes climbed down from their once lofty stature and descended into the political ghetto of “Flatten Bush.”

Ignoring their constitutional duties, finely crafted agreements between the executive branch and Congress, their own recent rulings, fairness to lawful combatants, the security of the homeland and our fighting forces, and even plain logic, the Supremes spray-painted their graffiti tags all over Article 9, Section I of the Constitution with Anthony Kennedy’s disjointed, sentimental, and faux-intellectual opinion. 

The only possible motives could be that their contempt for Bush far outweighs any concern they may have for the ability of successor presidents to pretect the country and our forces abroad. What else could it be? You figure it out.