Handguns don't kill people, Department of Justice does

Human Events, Jun 4, 1999 by Coulter, Ann

The solicitor general, who argues on behalf of "the United States" before the Supreme Court, is not a legislator elected by the public to write laws. He is appointed by the President to enforce the laws the elected legislators in Congress enact. It is not his job to pass on the wisdom of the laws Congress enacts-or even their constitutionalityunless a measure is so laughably unconstitutional that no reasonable argument on its behalf can be made.

If the solicitor general could capriciously refuse to enforce laws, he would be the most powerful man in the United States government. He would have unilateral veto power.

Indeed, the attorney general is required by law to notify the United States Congress whenever the department will not defend the constitutionality of a federal statute. Then Congress can bypass the Department of Justice and hire its own lawyers to defend its laws.

But enforcing the laws is not really in Congress's job description. That is why in the confirmation hearings for Seth Waxman, Clinton's solicitor general, Sen. Orrin Hatch asked him if the would follow the same standard as the Reagan and Bush Administrations, that "the attorney general is bound to defend the constitutionality of all acts of Congress unless no reasonable argument can be made in support"?

Waxman said he would and that "[T]he solicitor general should defend that law against constitutional challenge whenever reasonable arguments can be made in support of its constitutionality, except in the rarest instances, such as where the statute violates the constitutional separation of powers or directly conflicts with a Supreme Court ruling of constitutional dimension."

Not only does Section 3501 not conflict with a Supreme Court ruling "of constitutional dimension" (one wonders how that differs from a Supreme Court ruling "on the Constitution") but the Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that a law much like Section 3501 would be constitutional.

Indeed, a certain volatile Italian on the Supreme Court has harangued the government to raise Section 3501 in the next Miranda case.

Miranda Not Constitutional Rights

Moreover, the Supreme Court has repeatedly, exhaustively, in innumerable cases, held that the Miranda warnings are "not themselves rights protected by the Constitution." See, e.g., Michigan v. Tucker, and approximately three thousand other cases. The court has expressly held that the warnings are "not constitutional in character"-Withrow v. Williams, which must be something like being a ruling not "of constitutional dimension."

What the 5th Amendment actually states, in relevant part, is this: "nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." All that the 5th Amendment requires of criminal confessions is that they be voluntary.

Because Congress had established no rules for determining whether a confession was voluntary-and because Supreme Court justices, like Seth Waxman, really want to be congressmen without the accountability-the Supreme Court wrote some up with the Miranda warnings in a 5-to4 decision.