MICHAEL WALSH: Which Is to Be Master?

To justify their very expensive parasitical role in the conduct of policy, no doubt they can all quote Robert Bolt’s speech for St. Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons by heart:

William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”

Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”

William Roper: “Yes, I’d cut down every law in England to do that!”

Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ’round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

Spoiler alert: More wound up separated from his head shortly thereafter, first placed on a pike on London Bridge and later in a casket, which his daughter Margaret and her family kept for many years as the ultimate memento mori.  It’s a pretty speech but are the sentiments expressed in it correct? As former Justice Arthur Goldberg wrote in 1963: “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” In this, he echoed Justice Robert Jackson’s opinion in a 1949 case that “there is danger that, if the court does not temper its doctrinaire logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.” Jackson knew whereof he spoke, having been one of the lead prosecutors of National Socialist German Workers Party war criminals at Nuremberg.

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