Topic: CNSNews.com
When Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement, CNSNews.com made sure to bid him good riddance.
A June 27 article -- credited to "CNSNews.com staff" but carrying the pedantic tone of editor in chief Terry Jeffrey -- complained that "The two opinions Kennedy wrote that may have had the greatest impact on American society and law were both in 5-4 decisions, where he was the swing vote. One upheld Roe v. Wade and declared abortion a constitutional right. The other declared that same-sex marriage is a 'right' and that the Constitution commands that the states recognize it." Putting the word "right" in scare quotes while discussing those decisions are a hallmark of this article; it devotes nine paragraphs of the 35-paragraph article repeating dissenting opinions from the same-sex marraige decision, which aren't really about Kennedy but are all about forwarding CNS' anti-gay agenda.
Jeffrey's July 3 column insisted that "History will remember Justice Anthony Kennedy for advancing an illogical argument to deny a God-given right" regarding the Casey decision that upheld a woman's right to an abortion, huffily adding, "That places him on the opposite side of a fundamental question from the great Roman senator Cicero — as well as from Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr." Jeffrey concluded by declaring that "in Justice Kennedy's world, all rights are mutable — subject to whomever holds five votes on the Supreme Court." Of course, that's the same on the conservative side as well as Jeffrey and his ideologues fight to ensure a five-vote majority.
And fighting for a specific ideology on the court is exactly what Jeffrey is doing by taking aim at one particular reported candidate for the job.
A July 6 article by Jeffrey complained that Brett Kavanaugh "declined to rule against Obamacare’s individual mandate and argued that the case could not be decided by a federal court until at least 2015 because of the Anti-Injunction Act, adding: "All nine members of the Supreme Court—including Justices Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas—would later join in opinions (in the Obamacare case that the Supreme Court decided in 2012) that rejected the argument Kavanaugh embraced that the Anti-Injunction Act prevented a pre-2015 ruling on the Obamacare mandate."
Jeffrey followed that up on July 8 with an article grousing that Kavanaugh "accepted the assumption in a dissenting opinion he filed last October in the case of Garza v. Hargan that a teenage illegal alien caught at the border and put in detention has a right to an abortion in the United States," insisting that the assumption "contrasted sharply with the argument made by the states of Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma and South Carolina in an amicus brief presented to the court. Those states argued that Supreme Court precedent did not in fact recognize a right to abortion in the United States for an illegal alien caught entering the country—and that there was, in fact, no such right." Jeffrey did not explain that athese states have no actual interest in the case at hand, nor did he explain that an amicus brief is something parties without standing do.
If Kavanaugh actually is nominated, it will be interesting to see if Jeffrey and CNS keep up their opposition to him or if they will fall in line like the good little Trump stenographers they usually are.
