Patrick Leahy, U.S. Senator from Vermont, on the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court:

Is this a nominee who will protect and expand our constitutional rights, or will she neglect and narrow those rights? Learning the answer will be at the core of what the American people and the Senate need to know from the hearings on this nomination. I call your attention to two words in the first sentence: "and expand". Since when is the Supreme Court charged by the United States Constitution, Senator Leahy, to "expand" constitutional rights? (Oh, that's right, ever since FDR stacked the Court with non-constructionists to get his way with the federal bureaucracy. My mistake.) Expansion of constitutional rights is a duty assigned to the people, through their legislators in Congress and in their state bodies. Congressional rights are "expanded" through constitutional conventions, not through judicial activism. Such ignorance on the part of a majority of the American people is why our elected officials are able to get away with such foolish statements as that uttered above by Senator Leahy. Since basic civics are apparently not getting taught in our public schools any longer, how can we expect our citizens to fully comprehend how their government is supposed to work? Here's a little secret about conservatives and Roe v. Wade, just in case you're wondering: not all conservatives are pro-life. I know this may come as a shock to the mouth-foamers on the Left, and even to those on the Right who like to walk around with blinders on, but it's true. (Personally speaking, this conservative is pro-life.) Yet these same conservatives who are not pro-life oppose Roe v. Wade. Why? Because it came about in precisely the same way Senator Leahy seeks, based on his statement above: judicial fiat. You would find far less vocal opposition from the Right if the right to an abortion was in the Constitution as a result of a constitutional convention, passed by the Congress, and two-thirds of the states. We wouldn't like it, but at least we would know it was there as a result of the process set forth by the Founding Fathers, not arbitrarily created by men in black robes. For the expansion of rights to occur otherwise is to have, as The Federalist Patriot put it, "James Madison is rolling in his grave!"

Stephen Moore, in today's Political Diary:

There's an old saying that the only Marxists left on the planet are found in the faculty lounges at America's elite universities. Now the Leadership Institute has helped quantify the leftwing bias at our premier institutions of higher learning.

Its new report, "Deep Blue Campuses," raked through Federal Election Commission records of political donations in 2004 by university faculty and found -- surprise, surprise -- that the vast preponderance of these donated dollars went to John Kerry for President. This is a free country, and donating to political candidates is, or at least should be, a protected expression of free speech. But this report blows through the facade that the political views of university faculty are in anyway representative of the general community.

For every dollar that the professors at the top 20 elite universities gave to George Bush, they gave $10 to John Kerry. The ratio at Princeton was $302 to Kerry for every dollar given to Bush. The ratio for Harvard was 25 to 1. At Yale and Penn, the ratio was greater than 20 to 1. At Dartmouth there wasn't a single recorded donation to Bush.

These are more lopsided results than one finds in the phony elections in Castro's Cuba and Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Universities have become fanatically committed to the idea of "diversity" as an overriding objective on campus -- diversity on the basis of income, religion, disability, race, gender, sexual orientation. But political diversity? When it comes to the kind of diversity that would seem to matter most for promoting debate, intellectual curiosity and free speech, there is apparently little tolerance for differing views. What is demanded is conformity. And our top universities suffer greatly as a result.

David Limbaugh:

Their unhealthy hatred for Mr. Bush dates back to the 2000 election, which they -- irrationally again -- believe he stole from Mr. Gore. The fact is, Mr. Gore was trying to steal the election himself and almost succeeded, through one of the most egregious perversions of the rule of law in our nation’s history, by the Florida Supreme Court.

But the real source of their animus is even more basic. They resent him because he represents their expulsion from power over the executive branch, which the Clinton eight-year heyday should have ensured them in perpetuity.

You’ll recall that their "entitlement" to the legislative branch was stolen from them in 1994, which is one of the reasons they consider Newt Gingrich another personification of evil. Adding insult to cumulative injury, they’ve also lost their monopoly on the media over the last 15 years.