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 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?
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