Injustice Sunday

[cal04]

Radical right's anti-filibuster show an assault on truth

By Larry Dale Keeling
HERALD-LEADER EDITORIAL WRITER
Welcome to Injustice Sunday.


Today, if all goes as planned, Kentucky will play host to a well-scripted immorality play in which political and religious extremists pummel truth beyond recognition and twist Christianity into an ugly caricature of itself in their crusade to give Dubya the opportunity to perform an extreme makeover on the federal courts, packing their benches with enough "faith first, law last" judges to tilt our legal system dangerously toward the model of the Spanish Inquisition.

To achieve their goal, they will pull a couple of pages from the Neo-con Republicans Political Playbook.
So, expect someone, perhaps Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (he of the long-distance medical diagnosis who once again is reaching out from afar to kiss up to the religious extremists) to repeat the hogwash he and others have been spreading lately: that Senate Democrats' threat to filibuster some of Dubya's more controversial appellate nominations is unprecedented.

You don't have to go back to 1968, when Senate Republicans led a successful filibuster against the nomination of then-Justice Abe Fortas for chief justice of the Supreme Court, to expose that falsehood. You need only go back to 2000, when Frist himself cast one of the votes against cloture in the filibuster of Richard Paez's appeals court nomination. That was one of 14 filibusters of appeals court nominations that resulted in cloture votes between 1980 and 2000.

Unprecedented? Unmitigated bull.
Expect also to hear some tripe about Senate Democrats filibustering against "people of faith and moral conviction." To buy into that malarkey, you must believe that the 204 judicial nominees approved during Dubya's first term (only 10 of the most controversial were blocked by the Democrats) are lacking in "faith or moral conviction." I suspect some of those folks might take exception to such an assertion. So, you may hear Focus on the Family's James Dobson, another of the pettifoggers scheduled to star in this immorality play, repeat his comments likening the black robes of Supreme Court justices to the white robes of the Ku Klux Klan.

rest of the article
http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/editorial/11469057.htm

[NoPasaran]

1. The Passion of the Frist n/t

[BrklynLiberal]

2. H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y in its ultimate incarnation