A healthy consensus or a wrong turn

Senator Joseph Biden – (D) Delaware, a 32 year veteran of Congress, spoke at the American Constitution Society’s lunch on Friday July 29^th 2005. He eloquently and cerebrally delivered a message of self-examination, concerning Supreme Court nominations. His speech was more than a lecture or a stump speech, it was a reexamination of ‘consensus values’ established over the last 80 years.

In fact, Sen. Biden stated that his speech centered on “reexamin(ing) the essence of the social contract*”. In which, an examination is assembled over government and its role in our lives. Specifically, does the government have the right of intrusion? Does the government have the obligation to shield the public from powerful interests, whether those interests are public or private? These are the essential issues which the Supreme Court will be grappling with for the next 200 years or more.

Sen. Biden, who has been an adjunct professor of constitutional law for over 15 years, remarked that we should have a “healthy view of the constitution”. Encompassed in this healthy view is a true consensus of rights and liberties under the constitution. For as Biden reveals “at the heart of liberty is the ability to create your own perception of the world … not to have a perception placed upon you”.

Moreover, Sen. Biden unmasked the spin from the White House and congressional Republicans about Roberts being a “strict constructionalist”. Sen. Biden overthrew this notion with a more realistic explanation. In which, a “strict constructionalist” is code for “the whole sale liquidation of the constitutional right to privacy”. Concurrently, he states it is “appropriate and necessary to look at constitutional methodology because it makes a difference in our lives”.

Furthering, his point about the colossal importance of justices was a short history of the current court with particular attention paid to O’Conner. For example, according to Sen. Biden, there were 193 (5 to 4 decisions) since O’Conner was appointed to the bench. O’Conner was in the majority 148 of those times. With the resignation of O’Conner, Justice Kennedy becomes the swing vote, however the tilt to the right (in this case a tilt to the right refers to the lessening of private rights and personal privacy as protected by established constitutional law for the past 80 years) will be cemented with Kennedy as the swing vote.

Lastly, Sen. Biden ends with a common theme, for which, we all should think about before we wake up and place on our obligatory partisan faces. He asks a simple question, (paraphrasing) “do we have the power to protect ourselves from the powerful?” Besides, can we afford not to have measures of protection?

* Sen. Biden refers to this social contract (not to be confused with Rousseau’s unwritten social contract) as the Federal Constitution, which in his terms is a “Civil Bible”.