While Prime Minister Stephen Harper is breaking apart Canada’s judicial system (see my previous blog entry “Manipulations of Canadian Judicial Nominees“), we can learn a few important lessons from the US.
One of my trusted source in US politics CBC reporter Henry Champ has written an insightful piece “A new day in America’s halls of justice” and I am excerpting parts of it here (emphasis mine). If we allow Prime Minister Harper to corrupt and destroy the independence of our judicial system without stopping him, we have ourselves to blame in the future. Especially now we have seen what US President George Bush had managed to achieve in the US. Here is an excerpt from “A new day in America’s halls of justice“,
The latest decision
During their confirmation hearings both Roberts and Alito assured wary Democrats they would honour precedent wherever possible. Their first set of rulings together, however, suggests a different picture.
On school desegregation, the court limited a school district’s ability to assign white students to predominantly black schools as part of a broad integration effort. That was the first successful challenge to the historic Brown versus the Board of Education decision, one of the canons of the civil rights movement.
The new Roberts court also upheld a federal law banning late-stage abortions, even though the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down an almost identical law just seven years ago.
A similar about-face occurred by striking down a key provision of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law (designed to ban third-party attack ads), which the predecessor court had upheld only four years ago.
There were other conservative victories, including a decision that makes it harder for women to sue for equal pay and a ruling that blocked taxpayer efforts to stop federal spending on faith-based community initiatives.
The out-voted liberals
From the out-voted liberal side of the bench, the reaction was strongly worded. Justice Stephen Breyer called the school integration outcome, “a decision the court and the nation will come to regret,” adding: “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.”
Justice John Paul Stevens said, “No judge on the court I joined in 1975 would have voted this way.”
Among the public, the liberal outcry has been much more vocal. The New York Times thundered in an editorial: “It has been decades since the most privileged members of society — corporations, the wealthy, white people who want to attend school with other whites — have such a successful Supreme Court term.”
But the most prophetic might be the bumper stickers that are beginning to flourish here and there asking simply, “Sorry now?”
It’s a line from a column by Emily Bazelon [K: Check out Emily's "Sorry now? What do the liberal and moderate lawyers who supported John Roberts' nomination say today?" from Slate], an author and legal affairs columnist with Slate magazine.
Prime Minister Harper might think he could fool us because there aren’t enough people care or understand the judicial system. I hope the Prime Minister is very wrong on this. And I truly hope the various damages done by his government will not be too severe or too late to reverse by the next Government of Canada. In the mean time, please call your MP or the Prime Minister Office to express what you think about this and other issues.
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