The Bricklayer's Story

After twenty years, I've finally found The Bricklayer's Story. This isn't the original monologue (which's hilarious in its own right, but lame when printed); this's the song version, which I strongly prefer.

Hearings on Judge Roberts: absolutely disgusting

Ugh: these hearings are absolutely disgusting. A bunch of the senators on the Judicial Committee (although mostly Democrats -- I won't speculate here as to why) are trying to maneuver Roberts into revealing whether or not he supports the policy positions of their constituents, and want to judge whether or not he's a member of the supposed "mainstream".

It's irrelevent! Judgements about whether someone's in the mainstream are judgements about policy decisions. It doesn't matter if a Supreme Court nominee thinks that all Catholics should be drowned at birth; it's just not relevent. Judges have same job as basketball refs: not to judge who wins or loses, but to make sure the rules are followed. This means that a correctly operating Supreme Court justice's decisions may result in injustice if the fix for the injustice is unconstitutional. SCOTUS members aren't there to uphold individual instances of justice, they're there to protect our legal system itself. Correcting particular rights & wrongs is the job of the legislature, which is the reason legislatures are accountable to the voters. This job has nothing to do with the Judicial Branch.