The International Scouting Report on Miers-Gate

Dan Darling of Regnum Crucis offers some context for international bloggers and readers on the Miers uproar. Among his observations:

First of all, judges in the United States have far more power than those in any other country. As a friend noted in hyperbole while I was in DC last summer, they have basically usurped the position of being the deciding and ultimately final decision on any and all cultural issues. This is a decidedly new phenomenon and one that a lot people are extremely uneasy with because it basically amounts to a system in which anyone who can't get their pet issues advanced through the legislature instead turns to the court system and as the court has long ago done away with any serious attempt to make itself coherent on this note, the end-result you're left with is basically "you pays your money, you takes your chances." This also goes far beyond culture to a lot of other issues of importance, as the recent Kelo decision should make clear.

Conservatives of all stripes do not find this to be an appropriate situation and hence desire a return to our primitive, biblicist idea that the Constitution should more or less mean what it says. This philosophy, known as originalism, is extremely important to a lot of people and fits into the conservative idea of limiting government to its proper sphere and respecting the will of the people to have, among other things, a culture that they recognize at the end of the day. Both social cons and libertarians disagree around the particulars as far as what this means, but at the end of the day most of us all want the same thing. A Souter-type nominee would have been just an unacceptable to social cons as it would be libertarians.

In other words, a warped philosophy has transformed the once respected Judiciary into a council of Reasonable Despots that occasionally make a Foolish decision. Their decisions have ruptured subsidiarity and usurped the right of the people to have their elected representatives make laws in many circumstances.

The net effect of this has been to exacerbate people's disconnect with their government. Even people's right to private property suffers the indignity of government intrusion. The Kelo decision effectively empowers local governments to act as real estate brokers for big developers.

Be sure to read his entire analysis. It's worth it!