Does anybody know?

Caught Justice Breyer on C-Span the other night speaking about his rationales for deciding certain cases that came before him on the Supreme Court.

This earnest but typically fuzzy-headed liberal spent some time justifying the Court’s consideration of foreign law to judge cases before our American court, most recently invoked in the Court’s decision to forbid executing teenagers. He wants to bring us in line with legal positions taken by foreign courts and judges, kind of, like, you know, getting us to go with the worldly flow.

Were I a lawyer, I’d rise to object on the basis of the Constitution. What if the worldly flow has no foundation in our Constitution? While I am personally squeamish about executing teenagers for their murderous crimes, the only justification I can find prohibiting it in American law is, well, my squeamishness.

Somehow, Justice Breyer and four other liberal justices found executing teenagers to be unconstitutional. More specifically, it was cruel and inhuman punishment for people who inflicted cruel and inhuman pain and death on their victims. The thinking that brought the Court’s liberal faction to this conclusion came by way of France and other countries, not the Constitution.

Take your magnifying glass to that incredible document and see where you can find this unconstitutionality. You’ll need the Hubble telescope. Teenagers were executed for capital crimes during the years our Founding Fathers were working on that document and if they were squeamish about the practice my guess is that they would have written a provision against it.

But they didn’t. This was done by fiat, a decision made by our Supreme Court while they were sightseeing on foreign legal roads.

Then, Breyer concluded with one of the more boisterously meaningless comments ever to pass through liberal’s lips. After restating this “foreign” justification, he concluded by saying that the “objective is a law that works better for the average American.”

Wow! Doesn’t that sound great? So egalitarian. So … French. It’s one of those emotional, fuzzy sounding liberal ideas that makes the heart pump fast but, like The Shadow of old, clouds men’s minds. Because it makes no sense.

Who exactly are “average” Americans?

Are they the Americans one finds in the liberal ghetto of Massachusetts, Chapel Hill or the movie industry? Or are they the evangelicals who disagree with the liberal cultural and social attitudes? How about fiscal conservatives who’re cultural liberals, or free-spending liberals who’re cultural conservatives? Is it them? Are they the eighty-three percent of blacks who believe that Katrina’s ineptitude was a deliberate attack on their race? Or are they hispanic-Americans who resent the incursion of illegal immigrants? Maybe they’re poor whites who’re being screwed by affirmative action?

Extolling the “average” American is like saying you’re doing it so we could have “good” pizza or “better” lovemaking. What exactly is it?

Bottom line is this: An Associate Justice of the Supreme Court tells us he makes decisions based on an indefinable concept which we all have to live with anyway because it makes him and his ilk feel good. Is this any way to run a country?

If you have a clear and specific definition for the “average American,” I’d like to hear it. Better yet, send it to Justice Breyer.