Federal Judiciary

Kmiec and Obama

By AndrewHyman

Douglas Kmiec has written a statement endorsing Barack Obama. This will probably not start a stampede from the GOP to Obama. I certainly hope not.

Kmiec was an official in the Reagan Justice Department, and he was also a leading supporter of Mitt Romney (I supported Romney too). The folks at Powerline find Kmiec's statement "vacuous." And bloggers at National Review have been using phrases like "off his rocker" and "sour grapes."

Here's my take on it. Kmiec says that he's grown "tired" of the "lack of measurable progress on respect for life" under GOP presidents. But McCain has been very clear about his judicial philosophy and about human dignity. Kmiec also mistakenly believes that McCain is unsympathetic to illegal immigrants, is committed to a lengthy "military occupation" of Iraq, and is indifferent to climate change. Actually, McCain's concern about climate change is well known, as his (perhaps excessive) sympathy for illegal immigrants. And, McCain has said that any long-term troop presence in Iraq would depend on agreement from the Iraqi government, and would presume that "Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed."

Kmiec opposes McCain's position on the Second Amendment too. Professor Kmiec mistakenly denies that the Second Amendment includes an individual right to use guns in self-defense. He, unlike Obama, apparently finds that right elsewhere in the Constitution: "the natural law of the American Constitution prescribes the right of self-preservation." But cases like Dred Scott, Lochner, and Roe v. Wade have shown that the undefined and subjective commands of natural law should guide legislators, rather than be used against legislators by judges. Kmiec says that natural law is embodied in the Ninth Amendment, but that's just not what the Ninth Amendment says (that amendment is plainly a rule about how to construe the enumerated rights so as not to enlarge the enumerated powers).

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Full post as published by ConfirmThem on March 23, 2008 (boomark / email).