QUESTION: Isn’t it time for President George Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney to crack down on or completely repudiate the unprecedented verbal extremism that is making the GOP seem like a party teetering on openly calling for violence against judges whose decisions some partisans don’t like?
Answer: It most certainly is. And the latest evidence of verbal excess that seemingly invites every nutcase out there who doesn’t like a judge to whack someone in a black robe comes from — you guessed it — another GOPer who is lambasting an “activist” judge…who just happened to be appointed by a conservative Republican president.
Dana Milbank in the Washington Post writes:
Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy is a fairly accomplished jurist, but he might want to get himself a good lawyer — and perhaps a few more bodyguards.
Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of “Remedies to Judicial Tyranny” decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.
Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy’s opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles “is a good ground of impeachment.” To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith,” Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the “good behavior” requirement for office and that “Congress ought to talk about impeachment.”
SO: you impeach a judge if you don’t like the way they ruled. In other words, judges: you MUST rule the way Phyllis wants or you need to be fired. Get it? Independence indeshmendence…
Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy “should be the poster boy for impeachment” for citing international norms in his opinions. “If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well.”
So much for home schooling producing brighter students than public schools…
But that was just the WARM UP in this festival of hatred aimed at those who dared to dish out judgments that were not the correct ones (“correct ones”=those that they wanted):
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’ ” Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.
The GOP top leadership has to repudiate this kind of talk since it goes against the American system as we’ve known it for hundreds of years. You don’t impeach judges just because you don’t like their rulings. And you don’t even suggest that mass murderer/purger Stalin might have had the answer to providing a Final Political Solution to rulings you don’t like.
There are too many nuts out there — and, increasingly, some of them seem to be in the GOP.
THERE ARE OTHER VOICES SPEAKING ON THIS SUBJECT, TOO:
—Ann Althouse:”How stupid do you have to be to adopt Stalin’s “no man, no problem” when expressing opposition to a Supreme Court Justice?…I hope the cooler minds among the Republicans in Congress see the need to distance themselves from these sorts of attacks.”
—Daily Kos:”Does the conservative who can get closest to openly endorsing judicial assassinations without getting dragged off in handcuffs get to take home a pie or something?”
—Josh Marshall:”Another nice Dana Milbank article, this one on some of the borderline-violent anti-judiciary nut-cases the Republican majority (particularly in the House) is in the process of selling itself to….Perhaps it is time for the Democrats simply to embrace their destiny as the party of grown-ups. No members of congress threatening judges…”
—Kevin Drum:” Increasingly, this is the mainstream of the Republican party. It’s time for some housecleaning, folks.”
—The Debate Link has a long post on this with lots of links…with lots of background about the conference. Key quote:”Every Church, every Synagogue, every man of faith, and certainly every elected official (especially those present at the conference) has a moral duty to condemn these comments in the strongest of terms. The radical right’s war on America is going too far, and there must be some conservatives of principle willing to speak out against it.”
—Is That Legal:”If uttered about the President, this statement would undoubtedly be grounds for concern, and probably a preliminary investigation, at the Secret Service. At least two federal statutes make it a felony to threaten a federal judge: 18 U.S.C. § 1503 and 18 U.S.C. § 115(a)(1)(B). If Vieira’s comment would be grounds for further inquiry if directed at the President, shouldn’t it also be when directed at an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court?”
—Corrente:”So, it’s come to this. It isn’t just about the Republicans changing the rules when they don’t like the result. It’s about the Republicans advocating the assassination of their political opponents…Bush has already, by nods and winks, given the high sign for a murder plot against American’s judges. Look for lone gunmen, acting alone, leaving diaries……Somehow, I feel that calling for judges to be assassinated is going to play about as well as the Schiavo circus. As long as the Dems can hang it round Bush’s neck, of course.”
—The Poor Man:”When reality conflicts with fantasy, you can either abandon the fantasy, and deal with the hangover that follows, or pull the soft, warm covers over your head. And the harsher the reality, the nastier the hangover, and the deeper under the covers you hide to avoid it. But the hour is getting late, now, and you would do well to take off the beer goggles and see who you’ve been sharing that bed with.”
—Atrios:”Yes, there really is no doubt that invoking Stalin’s “no man, no problem” phrase is an explicit advocacy of the murder of judges who, shall we say, misbehave. I doubt any of the people doing the advocating actually plan on following through themselves, but they’re probably hoping they’ll inspire others.”
—Talk Left:”Justice Kennedy is in the cross-hairs of the radical right.”
—Roger Ailes:”Judicial tyranny. Making judges pay. Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah. From the tiny Texan Bug Chaser.”
—Suburban Guerilla:”They don’t actually like the U.S. Constitution – they only pretend to..”
—Jazz Shaw:”Come on, people. How much more obvious does it need to be? We’ve got leaders of these “moral values voters” standing up in our nation’s capital, quoting Stalin and talking about killing a Supreme Court Justice. How much ammunition do the Democrats need to take back Congress in 2006? Perhaps my expectations were simply lowered too much by John Kerry, but I have to say… if you can’t get these bozos thrown out of Washington, there’s something seriously wrong.”
—Bull Moose:
For the past thirty years, conservatives have ranted and raved against against the antics of the sixties left. Perhaps because of their symbiotic relationship with the sixties left, the right is beginning to sound like them. Instead of proclaiming “Smash the State”, the modern wing nuts led by the Tom Hayden of the right, Tom DeLay, are threatening to “Smash the Judiciary.”
….In contrast to the Yippies and the Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin types, the hard core conservative wing nuts are modeling themselves after the Stalinist Progressive Labor Party crowd. For those of you under 50, those ’60’s radicals were a fearsome and rather humorless lot who brandished crew cuts and wailed on against the long hair hippie crowd while quoting Stalin and Mao.It is only a matter of time when DeLay takes to the House floor paraphrasing Mao, “Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win, Judge Roy Moore, Live Like Him!”
—The Peking Duck:”Christian conservatives are preparing to take over the country. You would expect to see something like this in Iran or Saudi Arabia, not here…The theocrats’ attack reaches new and deranged heights. It’s time to stop pretending that this is a bunch of marginalized freaks and to acknowledge that many of the perpetratotrs are members of the core Republican base and include some of our very highest legislators.”
UPDATE: A debate on the Washington Post article and Vieira comments is raging over at the excellent conservative website Red State. Read the post there and the extensive comments.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.