The Lichfield Group

This article appeared in the December 28, 2005 issue of the Washington Times.

2004 marked no milestone in the trajectory of America’s history.

Nothing transpired comparable to the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation, or Pearl Harbor. The year confirmed that the more things change, the more they stay the same. To borrow from A Tale of Two Cities, 2004 was neither the best of times, nor the worst of times. Folly and wisdom, squalidness and courage, pettiness and statesmanship marched hand in glove on and off the stage.

This article appeared in the December 14, 2005 issue of the Washington Times.

The Supreme Court of Canada scaled a new peak in hallucinatory constitutional interpretation on December 9, 2004. In an advisory opinion sustaining the power of the Canadian Parliament to recognize same-sex marriages, the best and the brightest of Canada’s jurists insisted that the nation’s constitution was an organic “living tree,” not a petrified forest incapable of new limbs and climbing treetops. The “living tree” standard of interpretation, according to the Justices, gives birth to “progressive” laws and policies that answer “the realities of modern life.”

But like the Emperor’s new clothes, a “living tree” legal doctrine is naked of substance. It empowers the Canadian Supreme Court to weave its own progressive finery into the Canadian constitution without restraints on personal whims or prejudices. Such judicial abuse and arrogance is what the Democrat Party in the United States champions and hopes to foist on the American people. It speaks volumes that liberal Democrats have not denounced the Canadian judicial frolic, a silence that echoes their unspoken joy over the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court’s invention of a state constitutional right to same-sex matrimony in 2003.

This article appeared in the December 7, 2005 issue of the Washington Times.

War is hell, as General William Tecumseh Sherman sermonized. The Geneva Conventions and Protocols compound the hell for commanders and soldiers alike by ambiguously defining war crimes in relation to civilian objects as a failure to fight by Queensbury rules. As the United States Supreme Court taught in Connally v. General Construction Co. (1926): “[A] statute that which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning and differ as to its application, violates the first essential of due process of law.”

Article 57 of Protocol I to the Fourth Convention is tantamount to an impractical Miss Manners guide for planning battles and attacking. A commander is made a war criminal by neglecting to do “everything feasible” to verify that neither civilians nor civilian objects will be targeted. But what is feasible to a war critic or pacifist is militarily reckless to a war supporter or general. It would be feasible to devote hundreds of spies to reconnoitering for weeks or months to insure against a miniscule possibility of a planning mistake, for example, the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in the former Republic of Yugoslavia by the United States. But such scrupulous precautions might compromise military success. They are feasible or infeasible only in the eye of the beholder.