Council Results: June 2nd, 2006

There was a tie this week at the Watcher’s Council. When that happens, the Watcher votes — thereby breaking the tie.

The winner, therefore, was New World Man for "Who Do You Trust With Your Constitution?"

…who would you rather have figuring out whether things are constitutional, the Supreme Court or Congress? Poll every adult American and the answer would be hundreds of millions to 535 in favor of the Court. But no serious observer of the Court in recent years can escape the fact it’s making policy judgments in the guise of constitutional interpretation. “I want a do-over on my juvenile death penalty vote from 15 years ago, because... now it’s unconstitutional!” You may gravely nod and muse that this is just as Marshall intended, I guess.

Laws can be changed. State laws even more easily than acts of Congress. They are changed, all the time. Some that aren’t changed aren’t enforced anymore. But that doesn’t cover every situation! No. You should aspire to perfection in church, not in government. You’ll still be disappointed, but there’s songs.

The problem is that an edict from the Supreme Court can’t realistically be changed. I’m sure that anyone who argues that it’s a terribly hard row to hoe to change a state law will acknowledge that Supreme Court opinions are exponentially harder to reverse. There’s your first problem. If you’re going to hang your hat on the fact it’s hard to change laws in the legislature, it doesn’t make any sense to conclude that therefore, the Supreme Court should step in. Unless, I guess, you think the Court is infallible and will agree with your personal position on things 100 percent of the time. You must have another argument knocking around somewhere.

Joshuapundit placed second for his essay on the Pope’s visit to Auschwitz:

His Holiness visited Auschwitz Sunday....walking like an ordinary penitant seeking absolution through the gate with its mocking inscription ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (‘labor liberates’). I don’t use that language lightly.The present Pope lived the nightmare firsthand. He was an unwilling member of the Hitler Youth and was drafted into the German army towards the end of WWII. And for him to come to Auschwitz in this way and confront those old demons head on took extraordinary courage.

[…]

The destruction of the people of Israel is essentially the will to destroy G-d, he said: “By eradicating this people, those purveyors of violence wanted, deep down, to kill the G-d who had called upon Abraham, who had spoken on Mount Sinai and established the still valid principles of humanity there....If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the G-d who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that G-d finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone — to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world.”

And he continued: “Ultimately, the destruction of Israel was intended as an unearthing of the foundation upon which Christian faith rests, and as its replacement by a new, artificial faith in the rule of man, the rule of the strong.”

However, though he didn’t win, Sundries Shack had an interesting counter to the Pope’s remembered despair about World War II and the destruction wreaked by Hitler:

“In a place like this, words fail. In the end, there can only be a dread silence, a silence which is a heartfelt cry to God — Why, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate all this?”

“Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?”

Where was God? God was in the hearts of the Allied soldiers as they fought and bled and died to end the “endless” slaughter. God was in the will of the people of America and England and Australia and Canada and the other Allies as they bent their entire economies to support hundreds of thousands of brave soldiers who threw themselves at the evil that sought to envelop the world.

Here, the Pope is wrong. There was no endless slaughter, no real triumph of evil. The slaughter ended before its eventual goal was realized. Evil won a few victories but was thrown back in many others. Evil did not triumph. God did not remain silent. He spoke in the defiant voice of a man who looked into the face of death and said “Nuts” and in the ringing declaration to the Devil’s Own Hitler that “You do your worst - and we will do our best.” (emphasis mine)

Though a terrible crime was committed, we know that God was far from silent. He just didn’t speak in the voice of the Old Testament. But who expects him to except perhaps the naive or callously skeptical among us?

From the non-Council submissions, Maxed Out Mama won for her essay, "Guest Workers" Are Destroying Us:

…things have reached a tipping point. Many of the people coming here aren’t coming here to live. They wouldn’t bring their families here even if they could, because they don’t earn enough to support them here. They are coming here just to work, and they send the bulk of their wages back home to support their families. They could not support their families on their wages if their families lived here. That’s the problem.

That is why Chief No-Nag, who is an immigrant from Central America, who began life as a Indian peasant, whose village experienced a massacre during WWII, who carried a 50-lb bag of rotten corn on his back 50 miles when he was sixteen in order to save his family in a famine, who got schooling in Central America and rose into the upper middle-class in Central America, who left that and came to this country legally for a life in a just society, who became a naturalized citizen, who went to college here, became a scientist, and holds patents - that’s why Chief No-Nag describes the Senate bill as “sickening”, “an attempt to generate slave-labor”, “insane” and “unjust” and “unconstitutional”. It isn’t unconstitutional, of course, but “unconstitutional” is pretty much the most pejorative term of which he can perceive. To him “unconstitutional” means a violation of the basic rules of American society - a violation of those rules which have created American society.

[…]

He looked up the numbers of Democrats and Republicans who voted for the Senate bill, and he told me with some relish that the support was majority Democrat. He pointed out that it proved what he has been saying about Democrats - that they are elitists, that they are trying to create a plantation stocked with serfs, that they want a servant class. He says their education policies are aimed at creating a helpless class of people to be captive voters.

Here’s what Chief No-Nag knows. The fact is that if an American construction worker is competing to support his family with a construction worker with a family in Mexico, the American will never be able to support his family. Because of massive numbers of unskilled immigrants who aren’t bringing their families to live here, millions of American families are sliding out of the lower middle class. That’s the problem!

Those who support throwing open the doors to basically unskilled immigrants (guest workers) are destroying all fairness in our society. They are foolish beyond belief, and if they succeed they will turn the US into a stratified society with a caste and class system that is utterly antithetical to our culture.

A scary scenario, but I think she’s right.

Everything is over at the Watcher’s post, here.