Missouri Governor Blunt wants to nominate qualified judges who are

St. Louis Daily Record & St. Louis Countian, Jun 22, 2007 by Trish Mehaffey

Gov. Matt Blunt, who will get a chance to appoint a justice to the state Supreme Court later this year, told the Federalist Society he wants to nominate qualified judges who were "faithful to the constitution."

He stopped by a luncheon with the lawyer's chapter of the society Thursday in Kansas City to share his outlook of the courts.

Blunt said more of the U.S. public and Missourians shared U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts' beliefs than the "active liberty" philosophy of Justice Stephen Breyer. He quoted Breyer's short book on judicial interpretation, where Breyer writes that judges should reconstruct "past solutions imaginatively" and "project the purposes which inspired" past solutions to reach a decision.

"Breyer's followers don't believe the constitution was formed to preserve freedom but instead to promote active liberty. In other words, they do not believe the constitution is a document that limits government power, thereby preserving freedom."

Judges have the responsibility to follow the rule of law, he said. They shouldn't use their imagination or rule by inspiration and ideology. That's best left to "poets and artists" or legislators.

"Those are not good word for judges," Blunt said. "Judges merely say what law is."

Blunt picked a receptive audience. The Federalist Society is a national group is dedicated to ensuring that judges understand that the "duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be."

Blunt said the Missouri Supreme Court wasn't immune to stepping over those judicial boundaries, listing examples. Last year the court struck down a voter-identification law that a majority of Missourians supported and was similar to an Arizona law that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld.

The court ruled in December that Planned Parenthood could keep almost $1 million it received from state coffers in violation of Missouri's ban on abortion funding, Blunt said.

"Finally, just over a month ago," he said, "the court overturned 60 years of precedent to invent a state constitutional right to collective bargaining for government employees."

Blunt offered two solutions to the problem. The first is to pass new laws and constitutional provisions to protect the constitution and the separation of powers. The second is to ensure appointees to the bench understand the difference between the roles of judges and legislators.

Blunt said passing a bill to prevent problems that have occurred in Kansas with judicially imposed tax hikes. The Kansas court ordered the Legislature to spend $287 million more on education. The bill, HJR1, states the court can't order the general assembly, under any circumstances, to increase taxes or create new taxes.

Blunt said he hoped the appellate judicial commission would respect Missouri voters by selecting nominees who dutifully interpret the constitution and statutes without regard to their own preferences.

He borrowed Roberts' analogy that judges should be umpires. They don't make the rules, only apply them. A justice's job is "to call balls and strikes - not to pitch or bat."

Meanwhile, across the state in St. Louis, U.S. Attorney Catherine Hanaway had a message of her own for local members of the Federalist Society: The U.S. Attorney's Office in the Eastern District of Missouri is working hard and working smart.

The Eastern District alone sent 1,057 defendants to federal prison during the 2006 calendar year, according to statistics Hanaway cited from the U.S. Probation Office. That's more than any other district in the 8th Circuit and more than the districts of New Jersey, Maryland, Northern Illinois and Northern Ohio each prosecuted, Hanaway said.

The office tackles about one child pornography case each week, prosecuting defendants for possessing, receiving, distributing and producing child pornography, she said.

Hanaway said 70 percent of the discovered images feature children younger than 12, 50 percent feature children younger than 5, and 30 percent feature children younger than 3. And in many instances, she said, the children are pictured with an adult performing a sex act on them.

"So it isn't just a picture of some pornographic image," Hanaway said. "It's a picture of a crime scene. It's a picture of a child being raped. So by merely possessing it, you are creating a market for someone to rape children and distribute these pictures."

The federal prosecutor also touched on some of the office's successful prosecutions, including the prosecution of the Kirksville mayor for arson and the ongoing civil and criminal cases against Betonsports, the offshore Internet gambling company.