From Friday's Washington Post:
Provocation is no excuse for derangement. And there has been plenty of provocation: decades of an imperial judiciary unilaterally legislating radical social change on the flimsiest of constitutional pretexts. But while that may explain, it does not justify the flailing, sometimes delirious attacks on the judiciary mounted by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and others in the wake of the Terri Schiavo case.
DeLay is threatening judges involved in that case with unspecified retribution. He said that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy should be held "accountable" for using international law in deciding a recent (death penalty) case. He wants congressional hearings to reinterpret the "good behavior" clause of lifetime judicial tenure to make good behavior mean not what it has meant for two centuries -- honesty and propriety -- but good constitutional behavior. Do we really want Congress deciding that?
DeLay is wrong about the Schiavo case. I think the law was a bad law, but the trial judge applied it properly. I think the judge assessed the medical evidence incorrectly, but that is a matter of interpretation, not of judicial impropriety or denial of due process. There is nothing here with which to threaten this judge or the judicial system.
But at least DeLay was coherent. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) wandered somewhere off the Pacific Coast Highway when, on the Senate floor, he suggested a connection between "some recent episodes of courthouse violence" and judicial activism -- as if courtroom gunmen are disappointed scholars who kill in the name of Borkian originalism. Even worse was a Washington meeting of over-the-top activists led by Phyllis Schlafly that issued a manifesto for the restoration of God to our constitutional system.
Go right now. Read the rest.
The S.S. Delay is starting to sink, and I don't think there are enough lifeboats to allow the house to maintain it's majority in 2006. And so it begins...
-The Oklahoma Hippy
*In case you weren't aware, Charles Krauthammer is one of the most conservative columnists writing for any major newspaper.
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