If you don’t like the way a judge or an entire court rules, take their money away.
Does that sound downright unamerican to not only law students, law professors but virtually anyone who has lived in this country over the past several hundred years? Yes — but that’s precisely the idea of two of the nation’s two Evangelical Christian leaders who have been working with GOPers in Congress, according to the L.A. Times.
In a sign of how far away from the mainstream of American democracy this wing of the Republican party has strayed, it’s a proposal that has been seriously pitched, according to the Times:
Evangelical Christian leaders, who have been working closely with senior Republican lawmakers to place conservative judges in the federal courts, have also been exploring ways to punish sitting jurists and even entire courts viewed as hostile to their cause.
An audio recording obtained by the Los Angeles Times features two of the nation’s most influential evangelical leaders, at a private conference with supporters, laying out strategies to rein in judges, such as stripping funding from their courts in an effort to hinder their work.
The discussion took place during a Washington conference last month that included addresses by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who discussed efforts to bring a more conservative cast to the courts.
Frist and DeLay have not publicly endorsed the evangelical groups’ proposed actions. But the taped discussion among evangelical leaders provides a glimpse of the road map they are drafting as they work with congressional Republicans to achieve a judiciary that sides with them on abortion, same-sex marriage and other elements of their agenda.
Indeed, this is worth boldfacing so no one misses it:
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and there’s more than one way to take a black robe off the bench,” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, according to an audiotape of a March 17 session. The tape was provided to The Times by the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.
And DeLay has echoed that view, as the Times notes, quoting him:”
“We set up the courts. We can unset the courts. We have the power of the purse”
More:
Dobson, who emerged last year as one of the evangelical movement’s most important political leaders, named one potential target: the California-based U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court,” Dobson said. “They don’t have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn’t exist anymore, and it’s gone.”
Get it? So now if you don’t like a court — just ELIMINATE IT if you don’t like it’s rulings. Where did you read THAT in any American history book about how our democracy with its separation of powers functioned?
QUESTION: We wonder if the swing voters and libertarian Republicans who voted for George Bush ever dreamed they would EVER see the day when this was being seriously proposed. We suspect when they cast their votes it was a “given” that the GOP top leadership agreed to centuries old consensus about how our democracy functioned. This is the group that wants the public to trust them to go along with a “nuclear option” — because they don’t like activist judges (??).
FOOTNOTE: The Times also notes that Senate Major Leader Bill Frist is scurrying (at least in public) to put distance between him and some of the undemocratic ideas suggested by those quoted in the LA Times piece:
Robert Stevenson, a spokesman for Frist, said Thursday that the Senate leader does not agree with the idea of defunding courts or shutting them down, pointing to Frist’s comments earlier this month embracing a “fair and independent judiciary.” A spokesman for DeLay declined to comment.
That’s true to course: Frist fudges, DeLay defies…
And it gets WORSE for this faction — and all who ENABLE them in the GOP by remaining silent.
No one has ever accused columnist Charles Krauthammer of being a liberal and he has now roundly denounced what seems to be a systematic assault on the American judiciary. Read his WHOLE column, but here are a few excerpts:
Provocation is no excuse for derangement. And there has been plenty of provocation: decades of an imperial judiciary unilaterally legislating radical social change on the flimsiest of constitutional pretexts. But while that may explain, it does not justify the flailing, sometimes delirious attacks on the judiciary mounted by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and others in the wake of the Terri Schiavo case.
DeLay is threatening judges involved in that case with unspecified retribution. He said that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy should be held “accountable” for using international law in deciding a recent (death penalty) case. He wants congressional hearings to reinterpret the “good behavior” clause of lifetime judicial tenure to make good behavior mean not what it has meant for two centuries — honesty and propriety — but good constitutional behavior. Do we really want Congress deciding that?
He decries the not-so-thinly-veiled threats against judges which bordered on inviting nutcases to take potshots at them and — shockingly — questions the legal pronouncements of that noted legal scholar Phyllis Schlafly. Here’s another chunk:
Let us have a bit of sanity here. One of the glories of American democracy is the independence of the judiciary. The deference and reverence it enjoys are priceless assets. The Supreme Court is the only institution that could have ended the Bush-Gore fiasco of 2000 with the immediacy, finality and, yes, legitimacy that it did.
Indeed, just think: suppose the Democratic party had taken its machinery and mobilized its activists and it and Al Gore had launched a battle questioning the court’s legitimacy. IT DID NOT. It was a “given” that when the court ruled, you accepted it — you didn’t go after the judges…and you certainly didn’t issue statements even remotely inviting physical action against them. MORE:
This is not just deeply undemocratic. It is politically crazy. Democracies work as stable social entities because when people are allowed to settle issues themselves by debate and ballot, they are infinitely more likely to accept the results when they lose. To deny them that participation is to risk instability and threaten social peace.
He ends by saying the solution is to appoint “a new generation of judges committed to judicial modesty.” And he sees a silver lining: ” Yet the recent eruptions of DeLay, Cornyn and some of their fellows may… have a salutary effect after all — scaring the bejesus out of judges, maybe even shocking them into a little bit of humility, something that does not seem to come to them naturally.”
Some may seize on that to blast him…but his main point is clear: DeLay & Co and those that enable and support their efforts are out of the mainstream of America. The judges aren’t the ones displaying behavior betraying longtime American traditions and the defense of the constitution…
UPDATE: James Joyner has some more instances of another prominent traditional conservative and church leaders refusing to drink the Evangelical-offered political Kool Aid.
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.