New Judicial Nominee on Roe v. Wade

Michael McConnell is Bush's nominee for the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals. According to this Byron York piece, he stands a good chance of being confirmed, in spite of he's strong public opposition to Roe v. Wade (I'm going to avoid commenting on how that is possible, for now).

The WSJ's online editorial page-plus, Opinion Journal, today posted some of McConnell's past columns which the WSJ published, among them, this 1998 article on the illegitimacy of Roe v. Wade. He does an excellent job in pointing out how the Court settled de facto the very question which it said no one else had and therefore it couldn't -- the humanity of the fetus -- by stating that abortion is protected by the (nebulous) Constitutional right to privacy. After all, if abortion is a "private" affair, that means -- by definition -- that it does not "abridge the rights of a nonconsenting third party" (McConnell's words), and that statement cannot be made unless you first conclude that the fetus is not a nonconsenting third party, a question the Court said it couldn't answer!

Argh!