Howard Phillips has been fighting for conservative principles for more than four decades, first within the Republican Party and then outside of it. In the first of this four-part FlynnFiles interview, Howard Phillips discusses the recent nomination of John Roberts to the Supreme Court and a half century of Republican presidents disappointing conservatives with their Supreme Court nominees.
Part II of this Interview sounds more interesting. It's too bad that stealth nominees seem necessary. Goes to show how poorly the conservative case for things has actually been articulated to the American people if we have to try and sneak justices in under people's noses. Or maybe the American people do understand conservatism and simply reject it. Either way I'd rather we have an unabashedly conservative nominee with a paper trail a mile long.
A few unrelated observations/comments
I was a bit surprised that Phillips criticized Souther for not holding a higher natural law view as held in the Declaration of Independence. If I'm not mistaken, when I saw him debate Roger Pilon at Conservative University two years ago, Phillips argued against the higher law view of the courts.
His son, Chris, founded the Capitol Steps when he was a staffer for Helms and now writes frequently for Lewrockwell.com His stuff is great. http://www.lewrockwell.com/manion/manion-arch.html Now that Ben L isn't here, I guess I can mention that I met him at a tribute to Sam Francis, where he composed a great song in tribue to him.
If anyone has read Rick Perlstein's "Before the Storm" biography of Barry Goldwater, he tries to tie the Draft Goldwater movement to Clarence Manion. The standard conservative history says "Goldwater took over the party, who paved way for Reagan who paved way for Gingrich and Dubya." So taking the fact that Manion funded Goldwater (even though they had serious differences on foreign policy) one of my history professors amazingly said "The Clarence Manion wing of the Republican party rules the country."
Also, I can't imagine how much better the country would have been if he'd been a Supreme Court Justice. I gave a speech at the Mises Intitute last March on the Bricker Amendment and I argued that it was well intentioned, but probably wouldn't have done much good. While I certainly repsect Dean Manion's refusal to compromise, in retrospect it would have probably been better had he stopped lobbying for the Amendment and taken the positiion.
Great job Dan! Lets talk numbers. Numbers help specify our level of confidence.
What percentage do FF readers believe that Roberts will be a Scalia/Thomas type of justice?
I guess I will go first.
40% is my figure.
I say 30%...give or take 15%
6.5%
