The Unregulated Offensive

Imagine turning back the clock on the Constitution to 1937, when laws to protect workers and wilderness were considered unconstitutional. Now read a story about Republican radicals who want to do just that. But not if you're planning to sleep well. 4/17--Buzzflash

The Unregulated Offensive

By JEFFREY ROSEN

Published: April 17, 2005

I. Justice Thomas's Other Controversy

If you think back to Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 1991, what most likely comes to mind are the explosive allegations of sexual harassment made by the law professor Anita Hill. Years from now, however, when observers of the court look back on the hearings, they may well focus on a clash that preceded Hill's accusations -- an acrimonious exchange that few remember today.

Early in the hearings, Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat who was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, voiced a concern about Thomas's judicial philosophy. In particular, he singled out a speech that Thomas gave in 1987 in which he expressed an affinity for the ideas of legal scholars like Richard A. Epstein. A law professor at the University of Chicago, Epstein was notorious in legal circles for his thesis that many of the laws underpinning the modern welfare state are unconstitutional. Thomas tried to assure Biden that he was interested in ideas like Epstein's only as a matter of ''political theory'' and that he would not actually implement them as a Supreme Court justice. Biden, apparently unpersuaded, picked up a copy of Epstein's 1985 book, ''Takings: Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain,'' and theatrically waved it in the air. Anyone who embraced the book's extreme thesis, he seemed to be suggesting, was unfit to sit on the court.