Blogging at Captain’s Quarters, our friend Dafydd ab Hugh advocates a very selective form of substantive due process, here. He wants you to weigh in. He specifically invites commentary from Xrlq and The Angry Clam (and me).

[Posted by The Angry Clam]

You’ve heard myself (and others) carrying on about how awful Alberto Gonzales would be. However, the press usually dumbs down Conservative opposition to Gonzales to abortion, and, if we’re lucky, affirmative action. However, Gonzales’ dangers run far wider than that.

Among other positions, Gonzales believes:

1) That the second Amendment is a nullity, and that the Federal assault weapons ban should have been renewed.
2) Shares Bush’s open borders insanity, including having ties to groups supporting drivers licenses for illegal aliens.
3) Forced Ted Olson to praise “diversity” in Grutter and Gratz, giving the Court the political cover it needed to continue allowing racial discrimination in the United States.
4) His public support as a Justice on the Texas Supreme Court for the “right” to abortion, which was invented out of whole cloth and has no mooring in the Constitution.
5) His chilling statement that ” [t]he Constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is,” and his display of the arrogance of the imperial judiciary even before obtaining a seat on the bench.

Let’s consider that record. These are the major conservative issues, and Gonzales took the opposition position on every single one of them. Even Justices O’Connor and Kennedy are on the correct side of the issue from time to time. From what we can see, a Justice Gonzales would never be on the correct side of the issue. I don’t know about you, but I can live without another Earl Warren, Bill Brennan, or Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court.

So, Gonzales fans, why on earth, given all this, are we to expect that Gonzales is at all acceptable for Conservatives? Because Bush thinks he’s a good guy? Sorry, but I’m not buying into the personality cult you all have constructed around the president. Any other reasons?

(Note: “The Power of the Jump”™ is a semi-regular feature of this site, documenting examples of the Los Angeles Times’s use of its back pages to hide information that its editors don’t want you to see.)

Yesterday’s L.A. Times story on the jailing of Judith Miller portrayed the issue on the front page as a “test of press freedoms,” and said:

U.S. District Judge Thomas F. Hogan ordered Judith Miller, 57, imprisoned until she agreed to testify in an investigation into the naming of a CIA operative, declaring that the rights of journalists to gather news and protect confidential sources must occasionally yield to the power of prosecutors to demand testimony and investigate suspected crimes.

The article took until page A18, and the 25th paragraph, to tell us that Miller’s source

has given a general waiver permitting Miller to testify; the journalist has said she does not believe the waiver was signed voluntarily.

When considering whether Miller is a martyr for the protection of sources, isn’t it particularly relevant that the source has signed something saying the source doesn’t need protection?

People can debate whether Miller should have been jailed. But let’s not pretend that this is a black-and-white case where a journalist is protecting a source who clearly wishes to remain confidential, as the L.A. Times implies on page A1.