hard heads soft hearts |
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a scratch pad for half-formed thoughts by a liberal political junkie who's nobody special. ''Hard Heads, Soft Hearts'' is the title of a book by Princeton economist Alan Blinder, and tends to be a favorite motto of neoliberals, especially liberal economists. mobile
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Friday, June 14, 2002
have you read the latest "tilting at windmills"? It contains this eye-opener from Charlie Peters: the federal judiciary, dominated as it is by Reagan and Bush I appointees, along with a few Nixon and Ford holdovers. The latest example comes from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. It has upheld a federal district judge who had decided that the Department of Agriculture had exceeded its authority by shutting down the Supreme Beef Processors plant in Dallas. Had the Agriculture inspectors acted arbitrarily or hastily? Hardly. They did not act until the plant had failed its salmonella contamination test three times. Why, then, did the court rule against the inspectors? For one thing, the court said, the meat already could have been contaminated before it reached the plant. For another, they said that since salmonella can be destroyed by cooking, it should not be regulated under the Federal Meat Inspection Act. As to the first argument, don't we want to make sure that the meat-processing companies buy uncontaminated meat or, if they don't, that they decontaminate it or throw it away? As for the argument that cooking can destroy salmonella, it ignores the fact that before the meat is cooked it can contaminate kitchen utensils, cutting boards, and other foods. And unfortunately, not every consumer is going to cook the meat long enough to destroy the bacteria. It may be fair to join the conservatives in saying that the cook should suffer the consequences of his or her carelessness. But what about innocent family members? And what about innocent customers of restaurants with careless cooks? Don't they deserve protection? >" Instead of digging through whether judges were racists 40 years ago, isn't this the sort of ammo judiciary Democrats should be using? Whether or not shutting down the Beef processing plant was appropriate, this is not a legitimate issue for a court to decide, much less a court of appeals. It is shameless, blatant judicial activism at its worst. key point: the conservatives want to use the next 4/8 years to shift the judiciary so far to the right that it doesn't matter who's President after that. Hell, they might even use a grandiose interpretation of the "takings" clause of the constitution in order to outlaw progressive taxation. |