I found it interesting that high-profile leftist blogs like Daily Kos and Eschaton were silent on Raich yesterday. How to explain that the four liberal justices voted with Ashcroft-Gonzalez to give the imprimatur to federal agents raiding nursing homes and rifling through medicine cabinets? How to explain why they’d vote to uphold practices that even some drug warriors find offensive, not to mention that in so doing, they strengthen the other arms of this war, including its disproportionate targeting of blacks and the poor, its dismantling of the Warren Court’s civil liberties advances, and that it has made war zones of the inner cities?

Well, Matthew Yglesias does explain, and frankly, he paints an ugly picture of what liberalism has become. After citing Andrew Sullivan, Yglesias writes:

Well, no, he’s wrong in that he thinks this is a bad thing, but he’s right that the important issue here was the federalism one, not the medical marijuana one. Sympathetic as one might be to the defendants in this case, a victory for their side could have led to very bad consequences down the road. Advocates of marijuana law reform are welcome to press their point of view in congress [sic].

And there it is. The prominent writer for the “moderately liberal” American Prospect would rather let sick people suffer and die and side with giving ever more power to the Bush administration than give an inch toward letting states of localities govern themselves. Because, apparently, should his side ever get power again, Yglesias wants to be sure he can impose his policies on the rest of us. And siding with sick people now might hamper his ability to slap high taxes, heavy regulations, and liberal utopia on red staters later.

As Thomas noted in his dissent, if government agents can raid a woman’s house and arrest her for six marijuana plants she was growing for her own use, there is simply no limit to what else it can do. Enumerated powers are meaningless. And that’s exactly what people like Yglesias want. Eradication of enumerated powers, federalism, and the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Complete authoritarian federal control over everything. States may as well not exist.

This is what liberalism has devolved to. I’ll call it “Beltway Liberalism.” Its values? Getting power, and wielding power. Letting a few Very Smart People run your life. They may feign at principles like compassion, racial equality, and civil liberties, but should any of those principles hamper the getting of the power, or weaken the wielding of the power once it’s gotten, they’re readily discarded. The right may have abandoned federalism and limited government for “security,” power, and moral authoritianism. But the left too has abandoned its best attributes, and embraced the worst characteristics of statism.

Between the two, there’s not much room for liberty.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 7th, 2005 at 7:29 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.