The Hill posts Republican National Committee talking points that were inadvertently released to everyone on the RNC mailing list in response to President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. Included are these points:
Justice Souter’s retirement could move the Court to the left and provide a critical fifth vote for:
o Further eroding the rights of the unborn and property owners;
o Imposing a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage;
o Stripping “under God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance and completely secularizing the public square;
o Abolishing the death penalty;
o Judicial micromanagement of the government’s war powers.
Besides the RNC concerns over property rights, can anyone think of why the others are bad from a public policy perspective? The abortion debate is as far as I can tell, moot; same sex marriage looks like an inevitability as state courts, legislatures, and ballot initiatives slowly but surely reaffirm the rights of private citizens to make consensual, legally enforced contracts; returning the Pledge to its pre-1950’s state means little to nothing to me as a citizen; abolishing the death penalty makes sense to me as incarceration is often cheaper and terminates the risk of executing innocents; and I think it is absolutely part of the core mission of the judiciary to oversee the government’s war powers.
In other words, is there anything of substance here besides the (apparently) knee-jerk reference to property rights (presumably a knee-jerk nod to 2nd Amendment rights and an implicit criticism of Kelo vs. New London)? I’ve claimed for a while that the RNC represents the hollow shell of a conservative movement that is intellectually bankrupt and these talking points seem to belie the truth of that claim.
Ducks and Economics 
You beat me to it.