Turning Back the Clock

Janice Rogers Brown is Bush's judge from Pluto. She is so completely befuddled about history and politics that, as Mark Schmitt points out, she equates "the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937"—Franklin Roosevelt is our American Lenin, both were dangerous socialists. But it gets worse. In her speech to the Institute of Justice in 2000, she throws around poorly understood ideas like positivism and natural rights, but what she clearly means is simply that she supports the most radical interpretation of property rights—no government regulation of the right to do what you want with your own property, perhaps even to the point that paying taxes would not be required.

Brown is so out of touch with reality that she blames everything that's gone wrong in the last 500 years on the Enlightenment. Mark A. R. Kleiman calls her speech a "manifesto for right-wing judicial activism" and wonders what Bush (or Rove) was smoking when he nominated her. Schmitt says she is so bad, so unacceptable to most Republicans (if they only knew), that the Democrats would do well to shift the spotlight from the Nuclear Option to the specifics of Brown and her qualifications.

It sounds like a good idea. The Bushites are turning back the clock so far that they'll soon have to start using an hourglass or a sundial to keep time. At first it seemed that Eisenhower's pre-hippie fifties would be far enough back, until the Social Security attack made it clear that Harding's twenties would be better. Unfortunately, that would still leave some of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive laws in place, so the eighteen-nineties might do, though some of the Southern Republicans still remained nostalgic for the years before the Civil War. Well, it turns out that's not good enough. Somewhere there is a Golden Age. Before the Enlightenment perhaps? Before the Renaissance?

The Neolithic, that's the ticket! In those comfortable caves, we'll be able to count on the unfettered reign of natural law. You gather, I'll hunt, so happy we'll be.