The Clintons' legal-defense fund mailed a pitch to Dr. Bernard Lewinsky. His daughter gave at the office - school vouchers; updates on presidential and congressional candidates; Religious Liberty Protection Act; other issues

National Review, Sept 27, 1999

Four men are being charged with capital murder in the killing of a baby girl in Little Rock. The interesting fact? The baby, named Heaven by her mother, had not yet been born. Arkansas had recently passed a fetal- protection law making it a crime to injure a fetus more than 12 weeks old (exempting abortions); the murder charges will be the first time the new law is put into action. It is now Congress's turn to follow suit. Rep. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) has introduced the "Unborn Victims of Violence Act" to punish the killing of fetuses in the course of crimes covered by federal law. Likely to reach the House floor sometime in October, the bill has already been decried by those who worry that protecting fetuses anywhere threatens the legitimacy of abortion everywhere. And, of course, they are right.

Alan Keyes won Alabama's first-ever Republican presidential straw poll. In other words, when Republicans in the state, the very heart of the Confederacy, had a chance to decide who should be the first president of the 21st century, they chose a black man. Students of American society, take note.

Allen Funt, host of TV's Candid Camera, has died at 84. He will be remembered fondly, because he represented a more innocent age in our nation's history. His show aired in various incarnations from 1948 to 1990--four decades during which Americans had the decency to be embarrassed when they were caught red-handed doing something unseemly. Two years after the program was retired, the Age of Clinton began. R.I.P., Mr. Funt, and your America.

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The Law

Judge Not

A federal judge shuts down Cleveland's school-choice program on the day before classes begin, threatening the education of thousands of children-- and then, three days later, reverses himself, as arbitrarily as before. The Arizona supreme court contrives to undermine the state's own laws by sending a minor to Kansas to get a late-term abortion. The New Jersey supreme court instructs the Boy Scouts to admit open homosexuals, and everyone else to stop regarding their conduct as immoral. School boards across the nation look to the Supreme Court in Washington to see what their teachers should say about the origins of life.

These stories all come from the newspapers of recent weeks, but it is not as though judges have been unusually active in this period. Similar stories could be plucked from almost any other period during the 1990s.

And this is said to be a decade of judicial quietude, which is testimony to how accustomed we have all grown to the notion that the courts may exercise a veto power over almost any major policy--or even set policies for schools, prisons, and other institutions. It is in this decade that the Supreme Court has implied that objective morality--in the Court's words, "a moral code that transcends human invention"--cannot be the basis of legislation (Romer v. Evans). It is in this decade that the Court has claimed to "speak before all others" for our constitutional ideals and suggested that it is better to stand by unconstitutional Court decisions than to undermine the Court's legitimacy (Casey v. Planned Parenthood). Two years ago, the Court ruled that it would allow states to ban euthanasia, but reserved the right to change its mind (Washington v. Glucksberg). Over the last three years, courts have struck down 19 state bans on partial-birth abortion on the grounds that they were vague: The judges insist that this horrifying procedure cannot be defined, even though a medical-school textbook was able to teach it. Just this year, every public school in the country was exposed to the risk of ruinous lawsuits involving "sexual harassment" by children because the Court so decreed (Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education).