The Supreme Court

When I was in law school, I thought of legal reasoning as essentially mathematical--that each issue, properly examined, could yield only one conclusion. My criminal procedure professor was constantly making the point that Supreme Court rulings were much more political, and that changes in the fact pattern would not alter the outcome, as the judges would simply adjust their findings to support a pre-ordained conclusion. "It's all policy," was the conclusion to virtually every class.

After Bush v. Gore, and in light of the current matter of the health care mandate, I am troubled by the coverage of the issue from a legal perspective, and by the efforts of both sides to pretend that this is not an examination of the constitutionality of a new law but a referendum on the current president and the role of the government in our country. I am uncomfortable in my cynicism, but even more so at the precipitous drop of my esteem for the Supreme Court. Another argument for term limits.