First Principles

So in today’s News of the Weird, it turns out that when Attorney General Mukasey was briefly heckled at the Federalist Society’s annual convention, the heckler was none other than Washington State Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders.

First, the Wall Street Journal’s take on the event is not to be missed:

A man at a table near ours stood up, early in the speech, and shouted, “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!”

He would have been right, too, if the definition of tyrant were “a government official who will leave office in two months as part of a peaceful transition of power after a lawful, regularly scheduled election.”

Indeed.  Bush’s by-all-accounts gracious and open transition is the period on the end of the sentence discrediting every moronic hippy who ever insisted Bush represented the end of Democracy.

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I met Justice Sanders several times in law school, often at Federalist Society events.  He’s a strong libertarian, far more so than me.  To say he’s somewhat eccentric or feisty just doesn’t quite capture the fullness of his character.  But I almost always agreed with his legal opinions and conclusions, and thought him a welcome check on the aggressive and illegitimate power grabs that often came from his robed brethren in that state.  His support of a conservative legal organization in as lefty a legal culture as you can get was admirable.

But these kinds of antics are unacceptable.  Robust debate and challenging those in power is great, but this is not debate.  It is thuggery and intimidation, unacceptable in their own right.

Worst of all, though, his actions have a much farther reaching consequence here, coming as they do from one of the few voices of sane legal theory in a very liberal state.  They allow all of his logic and reason to be discredited by painting him as crazy and irrational, making him a less effective voice for conservative legal theories.  In complaining so juvenally about “tyranny”, Justice Sanders has allowed that much more of the real thing to creep ahead in his own state.

Shame on him for that above all.