We watched the debate with friends last night, quasi-Superbowl-party
style.  I wasn’t impressed with the town hall model, particularly for the
way is positioned the audience members as dupes–mere question-readers, polite
listeners (to say nothing of the homogeneity of the sample of folks from the St.
Louis metro area).  I know the candidates simply wouldn’t allow for follow
up questions, but what good is a town hall forum if the questions are safely
sanitized (which we can expect in all of the debates) *and* the question-askers
don’t get to ask for clarification, nuance, specificity?  I want answers.

For a few minutes this morning, I’ve been reading these
fine
entries on the
debate.  Good points all around. The two strangest moments of the
debate–for me–were the small business, lumber company setup (Want to buy some
wood?) and the reference to Dred
Scott as
an example of justices failing to perform a "strict" reading of the
U.S. Constitution and instead to render a decision clouded by personal
opinion.  Relative to the Dred Scott reference, the live events in the debate, however, were neither clear nor
understandable as GWB spoke; as I looked back at the transcript
this morning, I thought the record, as formatted with sentence and paragraph
breaks, was generous to the President’s fumbling of "slaves as personal
property" as a matter of "personal opinion":

I would pick somebody who would not allow their
personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would
strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.

Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the
kind of person I wouldn’t pick.

I wouldn’t pick a judge who said that the Pledge of
Allegiance couldn’t be said in a school because it had the words "under
God" in it. I think that’s an example of a judge allowing personal
opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict
interpretation of the Constitution.

Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is
where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of
personal property rights.

That’s a personal opinion. That’s not what the
Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we’re all
— you know, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t speak to the equality of
America. [emphasis added]

And so, I would pick people that would be strict
constructionists. We’ve got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C.
Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution.

And I suspect one of us will have a pick at the end of
next year — the next four years. And that’s the kind of judge I’m going to
put on there. No litmus test except for how they interpret the Constitution.

A few critiques of Bush’s resorting to the Dred Scott case to address his
criteria for justice selections have–as you might expect–already made it to
the blogosphere.  Particularly thoughtful takes turned up here
and here. 
I’m sure the reference to the case was a grab at local resonance (much like
Edwards’ reference to the number of U.N. workers running the Afghanistan
elections as fewer than it would take to setup polling stations in Cleveland);
the judgment about slaves as citizens stemmed from St. Louis some 150 years ago. It resulted from Missouri’s slave-state status set against Illinois, a free state, just across Mississippi River. 

The most ironic aspect of Bush’s reference to the case is that Justice Roger
Taney–in 1857–rendered a judgment against Dred Scott and his fundamental human
rights because–as I understand it–Taney read the U.S. Constitution as a
"strict constructionist," which explains the Fourteenth Amendment
(1868) as a correction to the dangerous mis-applications of constitutional law
along strict, "that’s what the words say" readings of
"property" and "citizenship."  With "strict
constructionist" justices, then, I suppose you get readings of the law that
are so narrow and rigid that constitutional amendments are required to ensure
equal rights for all people.