Guess Who Wrote This:

If portions of the Constitution stand in the way of desired policies, rather than trying to change the Constitution, instead find someone with academic credentials to say that the Constitution doesn't say what it says, to make a halfway plausible, somewhat believable but basically pretend argument that it actually says something entirely different from what it appears to say and what we always thought it said. If the argument is weak, just sing it loud and stick to it! It is, in form at least, an argument! It was written by a law professor!

If you said Cary Tennis of Salon Magazine, you'd be right. Of course, he's writing not about judicial activism but the administration's arguments for its "program of torture," as apparently buttressed by Berkley professor John Yoo. And it comes as a rather meandering coda to advising an activist professor at a college in the "mountainous northeast" to stay where he is and not rush to the barricades, which he suggests after declaring that "if the current oligarchy cannot be removed via the ballot, direct political action may become an urgent and compelling mission." This is a profoundly ludicrous statement, as the current "oligarchy" (by which I assume he means the Bush administration) will be removed neither by ballot nor bullet, but by the 22nd Amendment. Perhaps he means Republicans in general, which leads to all manner of fascinating questions, such as why continued electoral victories for Republicans would qualify as oligarchic, and how such power could be wrested from them without resorting to means which are, shall we say, less than free and open.

But I don't expect answers to such questions, and am not concerned by them, as I do not think Tennis himself has even considered them. Rather, I hold this to be nothing more than the classic leftist phantasmagoria of civil disobedience as ersatz revolution. It is part of the Orwellian nostalgia of the 60's that believes that protesters ended the war in Vietnam (when it was really Nixon's policy of "Vietnamization," expanding operations into Cambodia, bombing the North without restraint, and opening relations with China) and forced the Nixon Administration from office (when it was really the Democratic-controlled Congress). Tennis plays a double game here: he wants to be able to stand in the streets and participate in a demi-mystical "speaking truth to power," but he has no intention of actually camping in the streets, nor of organizing anything that really would force the government from power. So he tells the young man that the time is not yet ripe, that he must preserve his status until the eschaton, when his gesture will have greater significance (as though anyone would be shocked by a professor at a protest. You see the time-warp these people are caught in? If anyone's stuck in the 50's, it's this lot).

I think we all know what Lenin would have made of this man.