Althouse Demolishes Diggs

Ann Althouse is not exactly a Conservative. She's more a legal positivist--one who believes that laws made by men can override the laws of nature--because after all, they are made (directly or indirectly) by lawyers and maintained or adjusted by judges, another classification for lawyers.

I think her confidence in those folks is generally misplaced.

Be that as it may, her Positivist foundation requires her to put the smackdown on errant judges; after all, if the Positivist community lets utter stupidity pass, an observer might begin to question Positivism. So Althouse demolishes Judge Anna:

So often, we’ve heard complaints about “activist” judges. They’re suspected of deciding what outcome they want, based on their own personal or ideological preferences, and then writing a legalistic, neutral-sounding opinion to cover up what they’ve done. That carefully composed legal opinion makes it somewhat hard for a judge’s critics to convince people — especially anyone who likes the outcome — that the judge did not decide the case according to an unbiased legal method of analysis.

So perhaps the oddest thing about Judge Taylor’s opinion in the eavesdropping case is that she didn’t bother to come up with the verbiage that normally cushions us from these suspicions.

Well, Professor, she thought she was among friends...

But this is sheer sophistry. The potential for the president to abuse his power has nothing to do with kings and heredity. (How much power do hereditary kings have these days, anyway?) And, indeed, the president is not claiming he has powers outside of the Constitution. He isn’t arguing that he’s above the law. He’s making an aggressive argument about the scope of his power under the law

It's an excellent piece. Just remember that a Positivist wrote the opinion which Althouse demolished.