From The Beaufort Gazette, 4/12/05:
http://www.beaufortgazette.com/24hour/opinions/story/2303649p-10508887c.html
Right-wing threats against judges
PAUL C. CAMPOS, a law professor at the University of Colorado.
Scripps Howard News Service
(SH) -
Suppose the ACLU were to organize a conference in Washington, attended
by Democratic members of Congress and prominent liberal activists, at
which one of these activists gave a speech implying that Justice
Antonin Scalia ought to be assassinated.
Suppose this activist quoted Joseph Stalin as authority for the
proposition that murdering one's political opponents was a desirable
way of dealing with them, even (or perhaps especially) when these
opponents are judges.
We can only imagine the storm of protest such a suggestion would
unleash.
Yet this, in effect, is what happened last week, when Republican
members of Congress and prominent conservative activists, including
people such as Phyllis Schlafly, met in Washington to protest the
behavior of American judges in general, and Supreme Court justice
Anthony Kennedy in particular.
Enraged by Kennedy's willingness to strike down laws making homosexual
relations between consenting adults a crime and imposing the death
penalty on minors, Schlafly and company were brought together by
something called the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional
Reformation.
The highlight of the conference was a speech by lawyer and author
Edward Vieira, in which Vieira called for the removal of objectionable
judges by whatever means necessary.
Vieira noted that our judicial system has what he called "a personnel
problem," and he pointed out that Stalin had a particularly effective
way of dealing with such problems.
"No man, no problem," Vieira said, quoting the Soviet tyrant twice in
the course of his speech (The full Stalin quote is, "Death solves all
problems; no man, no problem").
Note that this wasn't said at a Klan rally or a meeting of a Maoist
terror group:
it was uttered at a fancy Washington hotel, full of supposedly
respectable politicians and their aides. Indeed House Speaker Tom
DeLay was scheduled to be there, but cancelled at the last minute to
attend the pope's funeral.
DeLay, of course, directed some threatening words at the judiciary in
the wake of the Terri Schiavo affair, although he had enough sense not
to cite Stalin as what lawyers call "persuasive authority."
"The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for
their behavior," DeLay said ominously.
Sen. John Cornyn of Texas went even further, suggesting that anger
toward judges might lead people to "engage in violence."
At the conference, Schlafly insisted that "the people who have been
speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Sen. Cornyn, need to be
backed up."
Many things could be said about all this.
I will mention just two.
First, threats of violence are completely unacceptable.
I'll be curious to see how many of the same people who were (properly)
outraged by University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill's
incitements to violence will protest these sorts of statements.
(Needless to say, Vieira, DeLay, and company claim they don't actually
mean to incite any violence. Of course that's Churchill's defense,
too).
Second, it's understandable when people get angry at judges for
imposing their political preferences on everybody else, but it takes a
good deal of selective blindness not to notice that right-wing judges
are as prone to this behavior as their left-wing brethren.
For example, what's more disturbing: the striking down of criminal
sodomy laws that were practically dead letters already, or the
appointment of a president of the United States by an act of judicial
fiat?
In principle, both decisions represented equally illegitimate acts of
judicial arrogance.
In practice, one of them was little more than a trivial piece of moral
grandstanding, while the other amounted to something close to a
judicial coup.
Anyway, the fact that you can find almost no one who objects to both
these decisions reveals how hollow most complaints about judicial
activism really are.
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Proof, once again, that rightards are hopelessly addle-brained.
Harry
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