Bad News About The Supreme Court

Wow, get a load of this recent Rasmussen poll regarding the Supreme Court:

Most American voters (60%) agrees and says the Supreme Court should make decisions based on what is written in the constitution, while 30% say rulings should be guided on the judge's sense of fairness and justice.

This is a major, major problem with America, and a sign of just how far off we are in 2008 from what our Founding documents actually said!  Isn't the ENTIRE PURPOSE of the Supreme Court to make decisions based on the Constitution?!  And yet, we have only 60% who think the Constitution should be the basis of Supreme Court decisions??  Here's the oath these justices swear:

"I, [NAME], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [TITLE] under the Constitution and laws of the United States. So help me God.''

There's not much debate in there, you know.  I'll let you decide whether or not to be surprised by the following poll result:

While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama's supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge's sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.

Here's this notion of 'fairness' again.  Can you see how the Democrat Left (generally speaking, of course) puts far more stock in a single individual's notion of 'fairness' than in actually following the law as it is written?  This is the result of decades of liberalism creeping into our society.  This should be a giant red flag for the kind of legal hammer that will be wielded by the Left if the Obamessiah wins in November.  In fact, if Obama is already trying to silence those who are asking uncomfortable questions, what do you think he'll be like with the power of the Presidency at his command?

Fortunately, there's a small bit of good news:

Nearly all voters believe the selection of Supreme Court justices by the president is important. The majority (63%) believe it is very important. Just 8% think the selection process by the president is not important.

We've got a bit more to go, but it's good that most Americans understand how the President selects judges.  The next step is to underscore the problems with allowing liberal activist judges to ignore the Constitution in favor of their own personal flavor of 'fairness'.

These poll results show what happens when you have liberal, activist judges on the bench: the Constitution gets trashed.  When the Constitution gets trashed, no one can count on any real administration of justice because 'justice' is largely based on what constitutes 'fairness'.  The Founders knew this:

"Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness."
-- James Wilson --

For those of you without a dictionary handy, here's what licentiousness means:

1. sexually unrestrained; lascivious; libertine; lewd.
2. unrestrained by law or general morality; lawless; immoral.
3. going beyond customary or proper bounds or limits; disregarding rules. 

I'm guessing Wilson is referring to definition 2 (maybe 3) with this quote.  Here's another applicable quote:

"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account."
-- Thomas Jefferson -- (hat tip Heavy-Handed Politics)

We are bearing the fruit of these predictions today: judges, more concerned with their own agendas, over-rule millions of Americans' votes and drastically alter policies that affect peoples' lives.

The point is that without a body of law that applies equally to everyone, notions like freedom and justice become relative.  When they become relative, they essentially cease to exist, because they can be taken away by anyone at any time for any reason.

This is the viral result of the infection of liberalism, and it is fatal to the American way of life.

There's my two cents.