Saturday, February 16, 2008

Capitol Times interview with Goldwater Institute's Clint Bolick


The AZ Capitol Times has a revealing interview with the charming Clint Bolick, Director of the Goldwater Institute's Schwarf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation. Bolick is a hero to conservatives and libertarians across the country and we're fortunate to have him in Arizona. Unfortunately, due to copyright restrictions, we are not permitted to post the entire interview, however we can include a few excerpts.

Bolick said that the Goldwater Institute is the first free-market think tank to form a litigation unit, going from a watchdog group to watchdog group that bites. Discussing their recent lawsuit against the City of Phoenix for taking tax dollars to fund a $100 million subsidy to CityNorth to develop a high-scale retail development, Bolick observed, "Here we have a luxury shopping mall that many of the people who are paying for it won’t be able to afford to shop at. It’s Robin Hood in reverse." He noted that Arizona shouldn't be leading the country as the corporate welfare capital of the country. He named a few politicians he's attacked, mostly rightly, although he was wrong to attack county attorney Andy Thomas, who has an outstanding record as a protector of rights and fiscal conservativeness, with less staff in his office today than when he entered office three years ago.

Bolick discussed his career, from launching the Institute for Justice in 1991 to leading the Alliance for School Choice. He left the school choice group for the Goldwater Institute when, "I felt that the organization was in good enough shape that I could get back to my true love, which is suing bureaucrats." Justice Clarence Thomas is godparent to one of Bolick's sons. He explained his support for the AZ Civil Rights Initiative, "I view racial preferences as 'trickle-down civil rights.' They tend to help the people at the top and do nothing to solve the glaring problems at the problem of the economic ladder."

Bolick defended his kind of judicial activism, which he wrote about in his book David's Hammer, distinguishing protecting people's rights from the bad kind of judicial activism which legislates from the bench. Let's hope Bolick can win his suit against CityNorth. Considering Arizona is home to McCain, one of the biggest opponents of pork projects, it's embarrassing that at the same time in his home state we're #1 in the country for taxpayer pork projects.

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