WP: "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith": Republicans admiring Stalin

[iconoclastic cat]

This...is not good.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38308-2005Apr8

And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty

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."

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."

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.

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[mmonk]

1. Scarey times in the new America.

[Cooley Hurd]

2. Ten years ago, if you told me that a war of theocracy would be waged...

...on our gov't from within the gov't, I would've called you mad.

How the FUCK did we get here?!? (no need to answer, I already know...:()

[iconoclastic cat]

4. We got here "when a viscious creature made the jump from monkey to man"!

Apologies to Elvis Costello.

[whistle]

3. Right-wing justice....guilty until proven innocent...

....then disallow all proof!

[leesa]

8. Maybe we need to point out that this is the FRENCH way.

[whistle]

9. How so, Nepolionic Code you mean?...

<snip>
The Modern Era of Law
from Howard Zinn's Declarations of Independence


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


In ancient societies, in feudal society, there were no clear rules, written in statute books, accompanied by constitutions. Everyone was subject to the whims of powerful men, whether the feudal lord, the tribal chief, or the king.

But as societies evolved modern times brought big cities, international trade, widespread literacy, and parliamentary government. With all that came the rule of law, no longer personal and arbitrary, but written down. It claimed to be impersonal, neutral, apply equally to all, and, therefore, democratic.

We profess great reverence for certain symbols of the modern rule of law: the Magna Carta, which set forth what are men's rights as against the king; the American Constitution, which is supposed to limit the powers of government and provide a Bill of Rights; the Napoleonic Code, which introduced uniformity into the French legal system. But we might get uneasy about the connection between law and democracy when we read the comment of two historians (Robert Palmer and Joel Colton) on Napoleon: "Man on horseback though he was, he believed firmly in the rule of Iaw."

I don't want to deny the benefits of the modern era: the advance of science, the improvements in health, the spread of literacy and art beyond tiny elites, and the value of even an imperfect representative system over a monarchy. But those advantages lead us to overlook the fact that the modern era, replacing the arbitrary rule of men with the impartial rule of law, has not brought any fundamental change in the facts of unequal wealth and unequal power. What was done before - exploiting the poor, sending the young to war, and putting troublesome people in dungeons - is still done, except that this no longer seems to be the arbitrary action of the feudal lord or the king; it now has the authority of neutral, impersonal law.


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<link> http://www.ecn.cz/temelin/textonly/law_zinn.htm

[Moderator]

5. iconoclastic cat

Per DU copyright rules
please post only four
paragraphs from the
copyrighted news source.


Thank you.


DU Moderator

[iconoclastic cat]

6. D'oh!

[leesa]

7. Actually, I think it IS good, because it will separate the reasonable

Republicans from the lunatics in control now. I don't think the judiciary is going to go along with their anti-constitutional behavior. Maybe they will finally be inclined to throw BushCo shit into prison.