Ex Parte McCardle

As the election draws near, it is useful to be reminded not only of what is desirable in politics, but also of what is possible. Too much of what is desirable has not even been seriously attempted, because of the belief that it is impossible of achievement. The recent adoption by the Republican Platform Committee of a resolution to prohibit busing for purposes of school integration is a good example: it is a pure velleity if, simultaneously, one does not address how this policy is to be implemented against the Supreme Court’s (sometimes) adamantine insistence that such busing is constitutionally obligatory.

Similarly, the gathering support for tuition tax credits may, in due course, founder on the shoals of a Court decision that they violate the “separation of church and state.” That such a ruling would be a preposterous misreading of the First Amendment’s reference to “establishment of religion” doesn’t give us any less reason to predict it. It would just represent (to paraphrase Raoul Berger’s indictment in Government by Judiciary) “another of the usurpations that bestrew the path of the Court.”

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Anthony Tortora

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As the election draws near, it is useful to be reminded not only of what is desirable in politics, but also of what is possible. Too much of what is desirable has not even been seriously attempted, because of the belief that it is impossible of achievement. The recent adoption by the Republican Platform Committee of a resolution to prohibit busing for purposes of school integration is a good example: it is a pure velleity if, simultaneously, one does not address how this policy is to be implemented against the Supreme Court’s (sometimes) adamantine insistence that such busing is constitutionally obligatory.

Similarly, the gathering support for tuition tax credits may, in due course, founder on the shoals of a Court decision that they violate the “separation of church and state.” That such a ruling would be a preposterous misreading of the First Amendment’s reference to “establishment of religion” doesn’t give us any less reason to predict it. It would just represent (to paraphrase Raoul Berger’s indictment in Government by Judiciary) “another of the usurpations that bestrew the path of the Court.”