>I've to admit that the current SC membership is hardly
>a model of Constitutional support.
This is one of the bizarre things about the Constituion Cult. The conservatives on the Supreme Court defend their position by saying it's a return to the principles of the Constitution - the text itself and the intentions of The Founders. (For them, the meaning of texts, authorial intention, and the relations between the two are pretty unproblematic things.) To them, the liberal jurisprudence of the 1950s-1970s period were a departure from orthodoxy, and it's only now that we're getting back to the purity of origins. But here we have a left-liberal Constituionalist arguing that the SC is deviating from the Constitution. What neither side is willing to argue is that these conflicting interpretations are deeply political - matters of relative power and privilege. Instead, it's all framed as an interpretive struggle around the dead white boys' text. Weird, very weird.
Doug