Posted by Eugene Volokh:
Jonathan Rauch on Schiavo:
I'm still mostly sitting out the Schiavo matter (to the extent there
is still a debate to sit out at this late date), but I did want to
pass along [1]Jonathan Rauch's column. Whether you agree with it or
not, it's a serious and important challenge to conservatives. Here's
an excerpt:
[During the debate about the 2000 election, i]n The Weekly
Standard, Noemie Emery wrote that the two sides had "ended up
fighting to vindicate the deepest beliefs of their respective
parties. Democrats believe in intentions and feelings....
Republicans believe in the rules."
Democrats, Emery explained, "are the party of malleable standards,
in the interests of what they think of as just." They "want courts
and well-intended politicians to intervene to engineer outcomes
they think are fair." Conservatives, in contrast, know that life is
unfair, but "they do not believe laws should be calibrated to
account for individual instances of unfairness, as there is no
legal system conceivable that can begin to account for all the
myriad forms of unfairness life metes out." After all, "there is no
way to remove error from human endeavor. Life is chaotic, which is
why we need rules to channel it, to give order to happenstance, and
keep things from reeling out of control."
Conservatives believe that sound law depends on predictability and
finality -- or at least they did before the Schiavo case. The rules
should be written in advance instead of being continually
reinvented on the fly, and legal disputes should not be allowed to
drag on and on. . . . .
In telling the politicians to take a hike and let the law do its
job, the public was acting on a hallowed conservative moral
principle: "Enough is enough." Most Americans, including most
conservative Americans, clung to their instinct for good legal
order in a messy world. In other words, they clung to traditional
Republican values. Which is more than the Republicans in Washington
did.
In her 2000 article, Emery concluded by asking, "Do [Democrats]
really want elections that are infinitely reviewable, subject to
challenge on every slight glitch, every hurt feeling, every bright
sense of outrage? Do they think life can be fair without law?" Good
question. In 2005, what do Republicans think?
References
1. http://nationaljournal.com/rauch.htm
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