May 18, 2007

Rudy Giuliani got himself into a big pickle by responding to Chris Matthews' question about Roe v. Wade with, "It would be OK to repeal it. It would be OK also if a strict constructionist judge viewed it as precedent."  

The size of the pickle is deserved because the response lowered Mr. Giuliani to the intellectual level of Slick Willy Clinton, who after the Gulf War vote in 1991 spouted this oily beauty: "I guess I would have voted with the majority if it was a close vote. But I agree with the arguments the minority made."  

However, more important than a bungled response that reminds us of the expediently triangulating Clintons is the fact that Giuliani could have said something that takes a scissors to the string of Republican failures to educate the public about the dangers of Liberal Judicial Activism that winds all the way back to the Fifties.  

So, how should Rudy have responded? Before answering that question, we have to stipulate what he knew not just before the debate but before getting into the race: (1) that he would be questioned about his pro-choice beliefs (2) that if in a general election every pro-life Republican voter (62% of Republicans) refused to vote for a pro-choice candidate and every pro-choice Republican (31% of Republicans) refused to vote for a pro-life candidate, no Republican could win the Presidency and only a handful of Republicans could win any statewide office across the land.  

With those facts in mind, we can now suggest how Giuliani should have answered even if he had only a minute to respond:  

"I want to say first that whether a person is pro-life or pro-choice is an entirely separate question from whether or not a person agrees with Roe v. Wade. Now, I'll answer your question by saying that I oppose Roe because to arrive at a decision they were committed to making regardless of what the Constitution says and doesn't say, the five Liberal Activists in the majority told the American people not only that the words of the Fourteenth Amendment give off emanations that create penumbras but also that the penumbras spoke to them.   

As medieval and dictatorial as it is, that fact isn't the most stunning truth about Roe. The most stunning truth is that Roe is only one of a myriad of decisions handed down by Liberal Activist Judges who have fundamentally changed our form of government from a Federal republic to a judicial oligarchy since they began finding and interpreting penumbras in the Fifties.  

That's why I am committed to nominating Jeffersonian judges to our courts, judges who respect the Constitution and the people of the fifty states as capable of governing themselves, unlike the activist judges admired by our Democratic friends, who believe in practicing sorcery on the Constitution because they regard the people as ignorant slobs."  

Having in sixty seconds put Democrats on the defensive by having to explain how words emit emanations that create penumbras and why they don't regard the People as ignorant slobs, Mr. Giuliani can use other occasions to quote from other sections of Roe, again inviting Democrats to explain how Liberal Activist Judges work their magic. Here are some suggestions:  

"Democrats want to keep the language of Roe secret. But that's understandable because bringing it into the open will require them to explain how the emanations that created penumbras that talk explicitly about a "right" to abortion also spoke with mathematical precision that the "right" doesn't pertain to the entire nine months of pregnancy but only to the first trimester.  

They'll also have to explain why a penumbra that spoke precisely of a "right" to abortion in the first trimester suddenly resorted to vague generalities by saying that the right to abortion is subject to some limitations; and that at some point the state interests as to protection of health, medical standards, and prenatal life become dominant.  

Now, I ask you, Who do you think will be the ones to discover more penumbras that speak about what protecting health, medical standards, and prenatal life means?  

The question, my fellow Americans, is rhetorical because you know that the deciders of those questions will be the same Liberal Activist Judges who have Ôdiscovered' other penumbras to decide thousands of other questions, the same Liberal Activist Judges whose job, claims Justice Breyer, is to decide every question.  

Well, I don't accept Justice Breyer as a national decider, or a gang of five judges like him, or a gang of five hundred. I believe as Jefferson and Washington did ­ that the People have a God-given right to be the deciders and therefore that legitimate law can come only, as Washington said, by an explicit and authentic act of the whole people.  

That's why I oppose not just Roe but the whole idea of Liberal Judicial Activism. That's why I promise to nominate Jeffersonians to our courts. And that's why as President I'll do everything I can to shine a bright light on the true meaning of Liberal Judicial Activism for the democratic Federal Republic bequeathed to us by the Founders of the United States of America."

Copyright by A.J. DiCintio

This article was first published by MichNews.com on May 18, 2007, and is reposted here with the kind permission of the author.