Regard to Decorum

Much of what James F. Gill says in his article, Advice and Consent (10/31) concerning the proper role of the Senate in passing upon presidential appointments to the Supreme Court is incontestable; but his view that the Senate should confine its inquiry to questions of integrity, intelligence, experience and the like and pass over questions of ideology is not. The difficulty, of course, arises because the Supreme Court, rightly or wrongly, has taken control of a wide array of important and contentious social and political issues such as abortion, birth control, homosexual intercourse, differential treatment of gays and women, and voting rights. Moreover, given the potential sweep of the privacy rights that the court has discovered in the penumbra of the Bill of Rights, more may well be on the way, depending very much on the makeup of the court.

When the presidency and the Senate are in the hands of a single party, there is normally no problem barring a filibusterwhich has no support in the Constitution and which can be overridden when the majority sees fit to do so. But when control of the presidency and the Senate is divided, reflecting a like division among voters on important issues within reach of the court, then I suggest it is far from clear that the public interest is best served by leaving the president free to put control of the court in the hands of justices whom he is persuaded will reflect his views on such issues rather than the contrary views of the majority of the Senate.

Whatever the opinions expressed during the Constitutional Convention, the text of the Constitution does not support or even suggest such a narrow senatorial role, nor could the framers have anticipated the vast expansion of judicial power that has taken place since their time. And the effect of such unconfined presidential power is greatly amplified by the fact that the composition of the court may be essentially unchanged for decadeswitness the current court before Chief Justice Rehnquist’s deathirrespective of decisive intervening changes in the control of the elective branches.

It would be much less messy, to be sure, if senators would look only at a nominee’s qualifications of mind and experience; and surely they should not seek to learn how a nominee would vote on a particular issue likely to arise before the court. But I, for one, hope my senators would vote against a nominee who, for example, had authored a lower court opinion or an article endorsing the expansion of the right to privacy to gay marriage; and I would expect and support the right of senators of contrary view to embrace such a nominee.

In a sense, this contentious situation has been forced upon all of us by the Supreme Court itself by way of its Roe v. Wade decision. But that’s where we are, much as we might like a return to the good old days. Since each party now takes either a wide or narrow view of the senatorial role, depending on who’s in control, and since plainly neither is going to change, it seems to me we might as well relax and confine ourselves to insisting that the Senators act with a decent regard to decorum. That’s challenge enough, it seems to me.

William H. Dempsey

Careful Scrutiny

In his excellent column Of Many Things on Sept. 12, Drew Christiansen, S.J., mentions the contention of Michael Buckley, S.J., that the roots of atheism were in 17th-century natural theology and suggests that the proponents of intelligent design...are repeating the mistake of using science as evidence for belief in God. He seems to hint that if scientific evidence is the foundation of belief in God, science will sooner or later (or again) turn us into atheists.

It seems that both intelligent design theorists, and certain evolutionists who oppose them, share a faulty and dangerous assumption: if God is involved in the creation and development of life, we will catch him in the act. Intelligent-design advocates believe that examination of life at the molecular and cellular level provides evidence of divine intervention. Atheistic evolutionists like Richard Dawkins believe that there is no such evidence, and that therefore God does not exist or at least can have had no part in creation.

These professional scientists prove amateur theologians. Who says that if God is involved in creationeither as an intelligent designer or the directing force of evolutionwe will find evidence of it? Is it not equally possible that God’s creative activity may be so perfect, so pure and so seamless that we will, in fact, find no physical or molecular evidence of it at all? The biblical tradition itself finds evidence of God not at the molecular level, but in the glory, beauty and overarching order of creationdecidedly unscientific evidences, grounded in human aesthetic perception. If the scientists are going to moonlight as theologians, we had better subject their theology to as careful a scrutiny as their biology.

Patrick J. Nugent