Justice Thomas' Line to the Deepest Bedrock

Reid's comments came during speculation over the possible successor to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, should he retire soon. Aside from the fact that Reid was disrespectful, we must ask why a Democrat would go on national television and criticize the second black Supreme Court justice in history while praising fellow-conservative Justice Antonin Scalia as "one smart guy"?

Savvy liberals like Reid are right to be more concerned with Thomas than Scalia because Thomas' natural-law jurisprudence represents the greatest threat to the liberal desire to replace limited, constitutional government with a regulatory-welfare state of unlimited powers.

Thomas is one of the few jurists today, conservative or otherwise, who understands and defends the principle that our rights come not from government but from a "creator" and "the laws of nature and of nature's God," as our Declaration of Independence says, and that the purpose and power of government should therefore be limited to protecting our natural, God-given rights.

The left understands that if it is to succeed, these principles of constitutional government must be jettisoned, or at least redefined. Thomas' frequent recourse not only to the text of the Constitution but specifically to the founders' natural-law defense of constitutional government is fatal to liberalism's goal.

The most sophisticated and enduring critique of U.S. constitutional government was first made by Progressive-era liberals at the turn of the 20th century. Their main charge was that the Constitution was old and outdated and therefore irrelevant to modern times and modern problems. Woodrow Wilson, for example, insisted that unlike the physical universe, the political universe contains no immutable principles or laws. "Government

From the liberal view, liberty cannot be a natural right, protected by a government of limited powers, because there are no natural rights. As liberal political scientist Charles Merriam explained in 1920, the "natural law and natural rights" of the founders had been discarded by intellectuals "with practical unanimity." Instead, "the state