JUDICIAL ACTIVISM

The "right to privacy," which liberals maintain is implied in the U.S. Constitution and which was used by the U.S. Supreme Court to legalize abortion in 1973, apparently mattered little to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month when he ruled on a case involving parental rights.

On Nov. 2, Reinhardt wrote the Ninth Circuit Court's decision declaring that the "right to privacy" did not apply to parents who wanted to prevent public school officials in Palmdale, Calif., from giving their elementary school age children a sexually explicit survey. The ruling is but one of many that Reinhardt's critics say qualifies him as one of the most liberal and activist judges in the nation.

Seven decisions that Reinhardt either wrote or supported in were unanimously overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court in a single year.

In the 1990's, in one session, the Supreme Court overturned 28 out of the 29 Ninth Circuit cases they heard.

Here are some quotes from "judge-turned social engineering czar" Judge Reinhardt:

• "They [parents] have no constitutional right, however, to prevent a public school from providing its students with whatever information it wishes to provide, sexual or otherwise, when and as the school determines that it is appropriate to do so."
  

• "Liberal judges believe in a generous or expansive interpretation of the Bill of Rights. We believe that the meaning of the Constitution was not frozen in 1789; that, as society develops and evolves, its understanding of constitutional principles also grows."
  

• "We believe that the Founding Fathers used broad general principles to describe our rights, because they were determined not to enact a narrow, rigid code that would bind and limit all future generations."
  

• "It was progressive justices with a view of the Constitution as a living, breathing document who gave full measure to that instrument, not the legal technocrats, not those whose view of the Constitution was frozen as of 1789."
  

• "When lawyers and judges adhere too rigidly to legal rules, they lose sight of the broader purposes for which those rules were created: to do justice."
  

When Stephen Breyer was a Supreme Court nominee in 1994, Reinhardt pressed him to "do justice, not just administer law," if he was confirmed to the high court, which of course, he was.

In deference to the Constitution, Reinhardt told Breyer that he should "Carry on the work of the court's great progressive thinkers."

Reinhardt shows no signs of slowing down in either his willingness to promote his liberal viewpoint or his alleged encroachment on legislative powers. When reporters ask him about being, arguably, the most overturned federal appeals judge in history, Reinhardt routinely smiles as he notes that the Supreme Court reviews only a handful of the decisions he hands down each year. "They can't catch them all," he says.

Full article here.