August 16, 2006
Carnival Of Liberty LVIII
A couple of good entries:
OK so I’m not really a cowboy gives us his thoughts on Tough Love. I highlight this because it has expressed some of the things I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately. I wonder why it is that I look at all my friends who are on various mood-stabilizing drugs for anxiety, depression, etc, and yet somehow I’m the stable one who doesn’t. The only rationale I can find is that I was challenged my whole life. I was expected to perform, and when I didn’t, my parent’s disappointment tought me lessons. I think that one of the crucial flaws about my generation is that too few of us were ever challenged. Too few of us have had to taste the pain of failure, because parents and loved ones tried to shield it from us. When you do that, you only make things worse.
We accept that the immune system is strengthened by exposure to pathogens, that muscles only grow when stressed to their limit, that without gravity, bones do not grow strong. But far too many of us deny the importance of being pushed to one’s limits when it comes to personal growth.
The key to a child’s success is not their diversity training, their self esteem, or their ability to use large words. It isn’t in making them ‘feel loved’, or in the clothes they wear. It isn’t in being passed along to get a meaningless high school diploma. It won’t be found in a four year degree either. People will only realize their potential when their success is contingent upon their own efforts.
The second post that caught my eye was Matt Barr’s discussion on The most powerful man in the country, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Overall, it’s a very good post about the overreaching our Supreme Court has undertaken trying to right social wrongs where they have no jurisdiction. However, I do think there is one mistake:
Contrary to what I gather is popular belief, it wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Founding Persons didn’t sit around wondering what would happen if something went sideways and say, “I know! We’ll have a Supreme Court who can strike it down!” If it even occurred to them that the Supreme Court might be in a position someday where it could erase laws from state codes they had considered and validated 15 years earlier, they would have blinked a couple times at how ludicruous the hypo was but then noted that Congress could take away the Court’s appellate jurisdiction any old time it wanted. Checks and balances.
Unfortunately, this isn’t quite true. Judicial nullification of laws that were unconstitutional was widely considered to be a legitimate and inherent power of the judiciary. It wasn’t spelled out in the Constitution because it wasn’t considered something they needed to. I’ll agree with Matt that they likely didn’t think the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction extended to state rulings (at least until the 14th Amendment). Nor would they have looked favorably upon the idea that the Court can write rulings which compel the legislature to write legislation, or the way they’ve completely disregarded the plain meaning in their “interpretation”. But judicial nullification on Constitutional grounds is and was considered a legitimate and inherent exercise of judicial power.
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