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.
Pretty strong language (emphasis mine), don't you think?
"should be impeached, or worse"... What could be worse than impeachment? Jail? Death? Those are the two immediate options that come to mind, but they (conservative leaders) wouldn't imply that, would they?
"Remedies to Judicial Tyranny"... Since when is a judicial interpretation of the law tyranny? Tyranny, as defined by the American Heritage Dictionary:
- A government in which a single ruler is vested with absolute power.
- Absolute power, esp. when exercised unjustly or cruelly.
Hmm, sounds more appropriate to apply collectively to the Bush administration.
And here is an "expert" opinion:
Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles "is a good ground of impeachment."
Since when should someone be impeached for deciding not to allow capital punishment for juveniles? Impeachment should be reserved for wrongdoing with respect to official obligation. Mrs. Schlafly should know this, after all, a lawyer should know.
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.
After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that "the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior." Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to "engage in violence."
"The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up," Schlafly said to applause yesterday.
This is very disturbing. Statements such as these must surely be coming from some fringe group! But wait, no. This is not some fringe group.
The conference was organized during the height of the Schiavo controversy by a new group, the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. This was no collection of fringe characters. The two-day program listed two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's "Ten Commandments" judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope's funeral.
These are people in very influential positions whose statements and views carry significant weight. Hmm, I wonder what might their agenda be?
Former representative William Dannemeyer (R-Calif.) followed Schlafly, saying the country's "principal problem" is not Iraq or the federal budget but whether "we as a people acknowledge that God exists."
Looks to me as if someone is trying to take the focus away from Iraq and the budget, the two most important topics today, and replace it with a discussion about God. Sure, let's take the focus away from evidence-laden topics into a very emotional and personal area of discussion sure to get people excited.
Invoking Stalin, Vieira delivered the "no man, no problem" line twice for emphasis. "This is not a structural problem we have; this is a problem of personnel," he said. "We are in this mess because we have the wrong people as judges."
From my perspective, the same could be said of Tom DeLay and the Bush administration. Perhaps the requests for impeachment should be directed at DeLay for his unethical behavior in office and the entire Bush gang for their actions in Iraq.
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