Today Senator John McCain attacked the Supreme Court’s death penalty decision as “an assault on law enforcement’s efforts to punish these heinous felons for the most despicable crime.”
The statement disregards the jurisprudence behind the decision, and falsely suggests that the majority regards child rape as less than heinous. It has the McCain trademark unnecessary hyperbole — (is child rape really more despicable than, for example, forcing a mother to kill one child with the hope of saving another, and then killing the other one also?) as well as reactionary “law and order” incitement against judges.
Last week McCain bashed the Court’s Guantanamo decision as one of the “worst” in the Court’s history.
It’s hardly moderate or statesmanlike or conducive to a new tone in Washington to undermine the rule of law through such incendiary language.
Either McCain doesn’t care about the legal basis of our Republic, or he is too ignorant to even begin to understand the Court’s decision making, or he is deliberately compromising his integrity to engage in these crude reactionary appeals.
Any of the three should disqualify him from becoming president.
You have to wonder whether he’d have any more regard for the rule of law than the incumbent.
Update: Barack Obama also disagrees with the Supreme Court. But note how his answer to a news conference question, as reported by the AP, is more coherent and temperate, (as well as more grammatical) than John McCain’s statement posted on his official Senate website (linked above).