Tension is mounting on Capitol Hill over the next Supreme Court nominee after the resignation of Justice David Souter last week. “Now that President Obama has become the judicial-nominator-in-chief, we can expect to hear a lot more about the liberal judicial theory of the ‘living, breathing’ and ‘evolving’ Constitution,” Richard Duncan wrote in the Washington Times today.

Some commentators reject an “original meaning” theory of interpreting the Constitution in favor of a “living, breathing” theory. For example, Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine, says, “Non-originalists believe that the Constitution’s meaning is not limited to what the framers intended; rather, the meaning and application of constitutional provisions should evolve by interpretation.”

Duncan says calling it an “evolution” is inaccurate and misleading. In reality, the notion of an “evolving Constitution” is a mask behind which the Constitution is literally being re-created. Duncan continued,

Is this really a theory of evolution? Or is it more honestly a theory of creation? How does the Constitution “evolve” into a new species in so brief a time? Surely, the sudden appearance of new constitutional rules in the fossil record is best explained by a theory of intelligent design, of creation, if you please, by shifting Supreme Court majorities. Thus, when Mr. Chemerinsky says new constitutional rights “evolve by interpretation,” he means these new constitutional species are called into being by judicial decisions (intelligent design) written by a creator consisting of no fewer than five unelected lawyers serving lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court.

Consumed with pushing their own agenda, these activists have completely lost sight of the original purpose of the Constitution and the way it was intended to be interpreted. “The Constitution,” Justice Scalia says, “is not a living organism, it is a legal document. It says something and doesn’t say other things.” Proponents of an evolving Constitution want matters to be decided “not by the people, but by the justices of the Supreme Court.” In other words, as Robert H. Bork puts it, “The truth is that the judge who looks outside the Constitution always looks inside himself and nowhere else.”

Expect the nomination process for the next Supreme Court justice to be a topic of national discussion and debate over the next few months. As you follow this discussion, consider reading No Freedom Without Law and Character in Crisis.

California: Liberalism’s Laboratory

California’s economic woes are growing to epic heights. The biggest cause, George Will contends in his column today, is hypergrowth in the public sector.

If, since 1990, state spending increases had been held to the inflation rate plus population growth, the state would have a $15 billion surplus instead of a $42 billion budget deficit, which is larger than the budgets of all but 10 states. Since 1990, the number of state employees has increased by more than a third. In Schwarzenegger’s less than six years as governor, per capita government spending, adjusted for inflation, has increased nearly 20 percent. …California teachers—the nation’s highest-paid, with salaries about 25 percent above the national average—are emblematic of the grip that government employees unions have on the state, where 57 percent of government workers are unionized (the national average is 37 percent).

Government bloat has raised California’s bills to unsustainable highs, and the state has generally tried to solve the problem not by cutting back but by putting a greater tax burden on the wealthy. Unsurprisingly, California is experiencing an exodus of talent into neighboring states—causing a net loss in migration of 1.4 million over the past decade. “California is exporting talent while importing Mexico’s poverty,” Will says. He concludes:

[W]hat actually ails California is centrist evasions. The state’s crisis has been caused by “moderation,” understood as splitting the difference between extreme liberalism and hyperliberalism, a “reasonableness” that merely moderates the speed at which the ever expanding public sector suffocates the private sector.California has become liberalism’s laboratory, in which the case for fiscal conservatism is being confirmed.

If California is liberalism’s laboratory, we’re about to see the failure in that state seize the country as a whole. The mushrooming of the size of government, the overspending—this failed pattern is increasingly being followed on a grand scale nationwide. Expect the same results.

Current Crisis Parallels Great Depression

“Deflation, inflation, mass unemployment—these are words reminiscent of the darkest chapter in economic history. Thus, it comes as no surprise that experts are mentioning with growing frequency a term that was believed to have been relegated to the history books: Great Depression,” wroteSpiegel last week.

More and more experts are making comparisons between current economic conditions and those of 1929. “The history leading up to the Great Depression reads like a review of the last decade,” Spiegel wrote. It also compared current conditions to those of pre-World War ii Germany, preceding Hitler’s rise to power:

One can only guess at the long-term political impact of today’s crisis. The reason the comparison with the Great Depression is so horrifying is that the world economic crisis led not only to the impoverishment of large segments of the population in Germany and elsewhere, but also to a political catastrophe.

The article notes that the economic crisis catapulted the Nazis to power in only a “short space of time.” Today’s crisis hasn’t produced any “noticeable political changes,” Spiegel writes—“at least not yet.”

The economic crisis is also precipitating the continued decline of the United States as a world superpower. According to Spiegel, “Even when adjusted for the size of today’s economy, the U.S.’s current debts significantly exceed debt levels during the Great Depression. The superpower has become an empire of debt.”

“If only the problem were limited to the United States,” wrote Spiegel. “But the situation that has been brewing on the periphery of the crisis is far more dramatic than it was in 1929.”

May Day Protests Intensify in Europe

May Day hit at a “delicate moment” this year “as the economic crisis drags on and a palpable sense of outrage grows among those who have lost their jobs, savings or pension funds,” writes the New York Times. According to the article, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets in Europe to protest rising unemployment and their governments’ poor response to the economic crisis.

The General Confederation said that it had registered more than 283 events, protests and marches across France, double the number of events last year. It estimated the national turnout at around 1.2 million, five times larger than a year earlier, and at 160,000 in Paris. …”For some, the mood is hardening,” said John Monks, the general secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation, which represents 82 trade union organizations in 36 European countries. “It’s switching from worry to frustration and anger. This is the most important May the 1st in a long time.”

Pakistan On Edge

Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen has warned that Islamic extremists could soon take over Pakistan. This means there is a grave danger that radical terrorist could soon have nuclear weapons.

“If the worst, the unthinkable, were to happen, and this advancing Taliban encouraged and supported by al Qaeda and other extremists were to essentially topple the government for failure to beat them back,” Hillary Clinton said last weekend, “then they would have the keys to the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.”

The Pakistani government has already surrendered control of the Swat Valley—100 miles from Islamabad—to the Taliban as part of a peace pact. A couple weeks ago the Taliban used the Swat to mount another invasion, overrunning the Buner district—just 60 miles from Islamabad.

This past week Pakistan has been fighting to regain the territory. The Taliban agreed to retreat back to the Swat Valley on Tuesday, yet they are still fighting. An article in the Telegraph shows how much power the Taliban now has:

An sos text message sent out on Friday by a terrified local resident, in an area of Swat called Bahrain, says that the Taliban have established total control. Asking not be named for fear of reprisal, he said that they have set up check posts at the entrance to Bahrain, from where they kidnap those they want, including young women.”They’ve even warned the local schools to close the girl classes or face dire consequences. Yet the government says its writ is in Swat.”Another Swat resident said: “Every day I see armed Taliban move around freely. At the time of prayer, if they see anyone in his shop or walking about, they whip him with a stick.”…Islamabad’s defenses are being hurriedly fortified, with paramilitary troops stationed on the Margalla Hills, which overlook the city from the West. In the capital, there are thousands of followers of the radical Red Mosque, where there are now open calls for Islamic revolution at the weekly Friday prayers.”The Taliban will not stop at Swat. They will come towards Islamabad,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a military analyst based in Lahore. “If the army is to take action against them, it is going to be a really bloody battle. And then civil government will be knocked out.””Extremist groups based in Islamabad will move from within and they (Taliban) will build pressure from outside.”

The Trumpet has repeatedly warned of the grave danger in Pakistan. For more information, see our article “Pakistan and the Shah of Iran.”

“Tanks for the Memories”

The Daily Mail reports that Britain is to give up its domestic tank manufacturing capacity. Future British tanks will have Swedish chassis and be armed with German guns. A sad and dangerous day for the nation that invented the tank.

They have fought alongside British soldiers for generations, playing heroic roles on historic battlefields such as the Somme, Cambrai and El Alamein. They have carried famous names such as Centurion, Churchill, Cromwell and Crusader.But now, nearly a century after inventing the first armored warhorse—to storm through German lines in the First World War—Britain is to stop building its own tanks.

Gen. Patrick Cordingley, commander of the Desert Rats in the first Gulf War, issued a grave warning to all Britons: “I think we have got ourselves into a real tangle here. If you look at the economic troubles of the 1930s, it ended in a terrible war.

“Are we saying it could never happen again, that we will not be drawn into a war where we will need a full range of forces and equipment?”

Elsewhere on the Web

“Evidence was mounting in the spring that this was no ordinary flu season. There were 3,000 more cases of serious flu than usual in Mexico this season, and the number of ‘outbreak clusters’ was more than double. Previously healthy adults were dying from severe cases of pneumonia from San Luis Potosi to Oaxaca,” the Washington Post writes. In this modern world, certainly in the West, we have generally thought we were past the age of plagues and epidemics. Those were figments of the Dark Ages past, most have thought. The Bible’s forecast that such diseases would again become a lethal problem in our modern age was laughed at. The swine flu, the latest in a string of animal-borne sicknesses, is changing that perception.

Personal bankruptcies in England and Wales reached an all-time high during the first quarter of 2009. Just over 19,000 people declared themselves bankrupt—23 percent more than in the first quarter of 2008. There were a total of 29,774 individual insolvencies in England and Wales.

A new review of sex education in the UK has concluded that all British children must be talked to about homosexual relationships at age 11. Under the new rules, children as young as 9 will be taught about sex. Schools will have to teach “different types of relationships, including those within families and between older and young people, boys and girls and people of the same sex, including civil partnerships.”