Rove Says Conservatives Will Win Ideological Battle for Judges

The only problem I have with his logic is that conservative nominees lie about their positions in order to get approved for judicial jobs. Alito tells the Senate he'll recuse himself from cases where he has a conflict, and then once he's confirmed, he doesn't recuse himself and complains when higher powers intervene in the cases.

That being said, do you think that the Republicans are having an honest debate about judicial power and the elements of American law that they so despise, things like the right to privacy that is enmeshed so thoroughly in the Constitution that the founders didn't even think to write it in?

This is much like the right to own property. Where is that in the Constitution? The only reference to private property in the Constitution is in the 5th Amendment, and it explicitly applies only a low minimum standard that must be met before the state can take your stuff: "[No person shall] be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."

So Judge Alito, and more importantly Judge Thomas: since the Constitution doesn't specify what constitutes "due process" or "just compensation", do we assume that any state legislature can make that determination, or should we perhaps go to some foreign law to derive meaning to those terms? English Common Law, for instance, which I believe fully defines them in the way that we have come to understand them.

And when the Constitution lays out a freedom of speech, conscience, participation in voting, assembly, and so forth, how can one not conclude that the private sphere where the decisions of what to say, believe, elect, and with whom to spend time, is given preference in the Constitution?

Rove says that Conservatives will win the judicial debate, but he has no intention of letting the battle of ideas proceed in the light of day. They'll keep nominating judicial activists who routinely overturn the wishes of elected legislatures and play the black-is-white game of calling those who hew more often to the elected officials "activist judges". They'll run from Senator to Senator praising the right to privacy and the honored tradition of precedent, but the Supreme Court is bound to no precedent. It creates them and it can overturn them, and that's exactly what Roberts and Alito have been nominated to do--but they know better than to tell the American public that. It really is a con job. Link.