For Malta, Doug? For Malta?

I have not written about my fellow constitutional law professor Doug Kmiec in a while. Professor Kmiec, teaching at Pepperdine University Law School, was a staunch Catholic Republican pro-lifer who served in the Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan administration. During the most recent election, after supporting the doomed primary candidacy of Mitt Romney, he parlayed his distaste for the more openly pro-life John McCain into an increasingly full-throated support of—Barack Obama. Not only did Professor Kmiec support Obama, he came to view the latter as the true pro-life candidate and one of the most pro-life Presidents ever.

The tenor of Kmiec’s increasingly militant pieces on the topic caused much derision among his former political associates and ideological fellows, about which I have posted before. Academics, such as Princeton philosophy professor Robert George lined up to dismantle Kmiec’s philosophic arguments. Members of the Catholic priesthood and hierarchy began to question Kmiec’s religious assertions. Columnists have dismissed Kmiec’s political rationalizations. I met Doug Kmiec a few years ago and was quite impressed by his philosophic rigor about the application of natural law thinking to current issues of rights. I barely recognized the new Doug Kmiec. 

As the Obama administration faced questions about its domestic policies, Kmiec vigorously defended it. When Notre Dame was criticized for extending an invitation to the President to speak at the graduation ceremony and to receive an honorary degree, Kmiec was right there to defend the university and to laud the President in a gush of fawning verbiage. When Justice Souter retired and even before Sonia Sotomayor was nominated, Kmiec immediately (and unconvincingly to me) jumped on the Obama ”empathy” bandwagon.

Kmiec even reversed himself clumsily on the D.C. v. Heller decision. In 2007, he had supported an amicus curiae (”friend of the court”) brief in support of the constitutional argument for an individual right to bear arms for self-defense and against the D.C. ban on private possession of handguns. In 2008, the Supreme Court had adopted the position that brief advanced. In 2009, Kmiec criticized that same ruling as unconstitutionally ignoring the prefatory clause of the Second Amendment. He also opposes extension of that right to protect against state and local gun possession bans like the one in Chicago that is currently on review before the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago. Apparently, that natural law/natural rights approach that Professor Kmiec so favors in his constitutional law casebook does not apply to the right of self-defense that is crucial to protection of the right to life. Once more, he abandons his former straightforward pro-life position for one to match the nuances, not to mention bald-faced contradictions, on the topic coming from his idol in the White House.

That flip-flop was in accord with Kmiec’s reversal of his position on California’s Proposition 8, the pro-opposite sex marriage vote, something he also was for, before he was against it. In what has become drearily predictable, Kmiec has also reversed himself on the jurisprudential issue of constitutional interpretation. He now ridicules the “conservative” position that courts should interpret constitutional clauses in light of the original understanding of the language when it was adopted. This is in sharp contrast to his long-held and published previous views, voiced as recently as two years ago, when he was still working for the Romney campaign, about the essential nature of original understanding constitutional interpretation. His embrace of the jurisprudence of original understanding has disappeared along with his philosophic attachment to natural law.

Many have wondered what is producing this conversion. While not happening with the speed of Paul’s epiphany, it is nevertheless producing an equally complete Road-to-Damascus reversal of deeply-held beliefs, albeit in the opposite direction. I have previously speculated that Kmiec was angling for a federal judgeship. Others thought it was an ambassadorship to the Vatican. But the Vatican apparently let it be known behind the scenes that Kmiec was too blatant in his dubious assertions of the pro-life qualities of the President and unconvincing in his protestations of his own continuing pro-life stance. His increasingly accommodating views about abortion that essentially measured compromise as surrender to the pro-abortion rights side were unacceptable to the Vatican. Of course, the reality of Kmiec’s new-found acceptance of common ground mimicked that of the President himself, the most radically pro-abortion President ever and someone whose position on partial-birth abortion and whose hostility towards protecting babies born alive after abortion was more radical than even Senator Boxer’s.

So the question remained exactly what Kmiec was after. Now we know. It is indeed an ambassadorship. To Malta. For that, one surrenders life-long positions that, presumably, were deeply held and carefully thought-through philosophic and religious tenets? I am again reminded of something I have posted before, a remark from Sir Thomas More (”A Man For All Seasons”) to Richard Rich, the snivelling opportunist who acts as the King’s tool to bring down More in return for becoming Attorney General of Wales: “For Wales? Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world…But for Wales!”

For Malta, Doug? For Malta?