Richard's Reviews > Men in Black: How Judges are Destroying America

Mark Levin's book falls into some of the usual pitfalls that almost all biased political argumentation today falls into--evidence is often stretched and recontextualized to fit certain predisposed conclusions. The book is clearly well researched, and Levin is no doubt quite knowledgeable about legal process and the language of the US Constitution, but his conclusions are often stretched to a degree that no longer fits the evidence. I would hesitate comparing his method to a smokescreen, for I am not entirely sure if Levin is purposefully making exaggerated claims that he doesn't support but artfully disguises in the ethos of research, but at the core of many of his ideas are assumptions or basic contradictions that he just can't back up.

For example, Levin is trying to show with this book that there is a long-term conspiracy of liberalism that has been slowly forging opportunities for itself in the process of applying the Constitution to the cases before it so that there would be precedent to back what Levin calls unConstitutional decisions like in Roe vs. Wade. Levin pushes a good case to look further (personally) into the basis of that and other decisions and if they do have Constitutional basis, but Levin instead goes into a history lesson of the decisions that predicated decisions like Roe vs. Wade with the assumption that every opportunity opened in previous decisions regarding things like the right to privacy was in fact the doing of a long-term liberal plan to open the doors of power for an activist court. Certainly, legal cases are often made on the grounds of precedent, but instead of revealing the focus on precedent rather than the Constitution as a problem in the deliberations of the Supreme Court, Levin tries to turn the problem into an unsupportable conspiracy that comes across on the edge of paranoia rather than sound, unbiased reason. And when Levin starts out the book stating that the justices should be treated as humans rather than gods, he wants to convey the idea that their actions may be questioned, but will not acknowledge himself that the history of precedents may also be the mistakes of the same human beings whom he does not want us to deify.

Levin also breaks his guise of the the reasonable viewer of history when he tries to establish the intents of the founding fathers, equating Jefferson's participation in prayer services at Congress as a direct negation of his over-used mention of the wall of separation. Clearly, Levin cannot see no possible correlation between the two, and thus the questioning of the validity of prayer in schools must be a moot argument. Just to make sure that his bias is clear, he throws in a little slippery scare tactic of suggesting a future where religious observance is also banned in the home.

Levin makes the same kind of rhetorical blunders when he suggests that Blackmun may have turned 'left' under the influence of his wife (while giving a little shot in the arm to Richard Nixon for having the foresight of wanting to base a Supreme Court nomination partly on the quality of a man's wife). When discussing the famous argument over the inclusion of "under God" in the pledge of allegiance, Levin focuses more on how much the plaintiff's daughter actually wanted to say the phrase, which is of course moot when considering the actual legitimacy of requiring the phrase in a patriotic statement.

In the end, this book comes across as yet another argument of bias in what has clearly become a divisive popular culture--evidently, a book isn't commercially viable unless it has a line to hold, no matter which side.