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April 11, 2005
Tom DeLay's New World Order

Oh my god.

Seriously, what is the matter with this guy? He should be locked up for everyone's protection.

"Judicial independence does not equal judicial supremacy," Mr. DeLay said in a videotaped speech delivered to a conservative conference in Washington entitled "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith."

Now what he really means here is that judicial independence does not equal judicial independence. Judicial independence, in DeLay's view, equals judicial subservience.

Mr. DeLay faulted courts for what he said was their invention of rights to abortion and prohibitions on school prayer, saying courts had ignored the intent of Congress and improperly cited international standards and precedents. "These are not examples of a mature society," he said, "but of a judiciary run amok."

Right. It's not the mark of a mature society to take stock of what the great bulk of civilized humanity is up to. We should by all means completely ignore those terrorist-loving cheese-eaters and rule by the word of GOD, by god. You know, like Iran.

"The response of the legislative branch has mostly been to complain. There is another way, ladies and gentlemen, and that is to reassert our constitutional authority over the courts."

This goes along with that whole "judicial independence" thing. Separation of powers, meaning whichever branches are controlled by Republicans get all the power.

"I believe the judiciary branch of our government has overstepped its authority on countless occasions, overturning and in some cases just ignoring the legitimate will of the people,"

Ha ha ha ha. Damn! Ignoring the will of the people? The balls on this guy are simply tremendous. Why don't we tell the "people" what most of the Republican backed legislation is really about, Tom? See what their will is then. Or if you weren't allowed to call it the Healthy Forest Initiative, if you had to call it what it is, the Cut Down the Forests and Give All the Money to Your Friends Initiative, what then? How about that change in bankruptcy law you guys rammed through last month? Was that the will of the people?

Oh, and by the way, in the Schiavo case, the people were on the courts' side.

And now it gets really scary.

The organizers of the conference and Congressional staff members who spoke there called for several specific steps: impeaching judges deemed to have ignored the will of Congress or to have followed foreign laws; passing bills to remove court jurisdiction from certain social issues or the place of God in public life; changing Senate rules that allow the Democratic minority to filibuster Mr. Bush's appeals court nominees; and using Congress's authority over court budgets to punish judges whom it considers to have overstepped their authority.

"I am in favor of impeachment," Michael Schwartz, chief of staff to Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, said in a panel discussion on abortion, suggesting "mass impeachment" might be needed.

I don't even know what to say in response to that. Help? If you haven't called your representatives about this, Do it now. Call them twice.

And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, the following head-exploding words came out to Tom DeLay's mouth.

"As passionately as we all feel, especially about issues of life and death, the fact is that constitutional rule of law is a matter for serious and rational discussion," he said. "People on all sides of this debate need to approach the issue for what it is: a legitimate debate by people of good will trying to clarify the proper constitutional role of courts."

Serious and rational discussion. Tom DeLay said that. People of good will. DeLay again. He's pure evil.

As for the matter of clarifying the proper role of the courts, that liberal hippie Chief Justice Rehnquist had this to say..

In a recent report, Chief Justice Rehnquist called one such measure [to interfere with the courts' authority] "unwarranted and ill-considered" and said "a judge's judicial acts may not serve as a basis for impeachment."

(All quotes from this article)

Really, call and complain. Enough is enough.

Comments

Previous Comments

"courts had ignored the intent of Congress " I kind of thought that the courts were supposed to ignore the intent and look at what the laws does in fact. I think that is called judicial review.

Some of Delay's points can be made interesting; unfortunately he is not the man for that job. For example, it seems to me that the pro-choice movement would have been much better off, strategically, if not for Roe v. Wade. Whereas now the decision is merely one piece of case law, if the issue had been denied certiorari by the Supreme Court and activists had turned to the legislature instead - either for a Constitutional amendment or even a law - the basis for abortion rights in this country would be much less flimsy. Personally, I am far from an abortion-rights activists and only call myself "pro-choice" for lack of a better option. But purely as a tactical issue, the fact that the Supreme Court tried to link abortions to the fourth amendment strikes me as pretty weak. Perhaps more importantly, it strikes anti-abortion activists as weak, which is why they have not even begun to accept defeat on the issue. At any rate, this is quite the opposite of what Tom Delay is saying, and only goes to show that the Majority Leader (I still prefer to think of him as the Whip, even though he's not anymore, because the term suits his personality even better than hammer) has the capacity to take a potentially worthwhile discussion and dumb it down to a debate over whether the judiciary should be allowed to think for itself. I never expected to find myself agreeing with Mike, but yes, that's exactly what the judiciary is for. Unbelievable that the second-most powerful man in Washington (after Bush; Frist is a puppet) wouldn't know about the separation of powers, or more likely, wouldn't be willing to accept it when it's inconvenient. What an ass. The only good news about this guys is that he's more like Lott than, say, Byrd - what I mean is, when Lott went down for saying nice things about the Dixiecrats, it was a real demonstration of just how unpopular he was beneath the surface. By contrast, Byrd is so popular among his peers as the patron saint of legislative procedure and the last anti-war white-hair in government, that even when he made comments about "white niggers" a couple years ago, coupled with his background as a recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, and being the Democratic vanguard against the 64 Civil Rights Act, he's still teflon-coated. Tells you something, not only about double standards, but about how some guys have the backing to withstand a beating, and other guys lose their supporters as soon as the armor is dinged. I think Delay falls into the latter category, thankfully, and it won't be long before he goes WHOOSH like Newt. But that's my opinion.