Liberals Against The Tide

LAST WEEK the US Supreme Court decided a Kentucky death penalty case. It ruled that a three-drug sequence for execution by lethal injection was not cruel and unusual punishment. But a day later, to the delight of the New York Times reporter Linda Greenhouse, Justice John Paul Stevens “renounced the death penalty.”

Er, not to put too fine a point upon it, Your Honor, but the death penalty is the law of the land. You are sworn to uphold it.

Did you know, by the way, that liberal groups are working like mad to stop Ward Connerly’s Civil Rights Initiatives, coming up for a vote in four states in November? They are contesting the initiative in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, and Nebraska. But they are not arguing on the merits. Oh no. As Harry Stein writes in City Journal:

Knowing that such anti-preference initiatives enjoy strong public support... the activists have zero interest in waging these fights on the merits. Rather, their goal is to keep the initiatives off the ballot by any means necessary, up to and including political chicanery and outright physical intimidation.

Let’s see. Missouri. Reminds me of the Missouri Compromise. Nebraska. Reminds me of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Sound familiar? They should. They were fateful milestones on the road to the Civil War back in the early to mid nineteenth century.

Then, as now, an intransigent minority was putting road blocks in the way of civil rights. In those days, before the Civil War, the political argument was over allowing slavery in the newly-admitted states. Now it is an argument over when, if ever, we are going to stop race-based preferences in government employment, contracting, and schooling.

Here’s what I suggest to you liberals. Play fair. Don’t try, as Justice Stevens is apparently trying to do, to subvert the will of the people with shenanigans on the Supreme Court. The people are strongly in favor of a death penalty.

Don’t try, as these lefty groups are trying to do, to trip up Ward Connerly and his Civil Rights Initiatives. The whole point of democracy is that the people get to decide. If they are wrong, then it is probably better to let them have their way and experience their mistake for themselves.

But if you hold up the will of the people, and dam up their clearly-expressed preferences in tactical shenanigans then the chances are that when the dam bursts, as it will in the end, it will end up flooding the fruited plain with a raging river. And that’s not good for anyone.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.