American Politics Journal -- Judicial Nominations Without DeLay

Judicial Nominations Without DeLay
by Christian Livemore

May 13, 2002 (APJP) -- H.L. Mencken once said, "The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think."

Funny, I was thinking the same thing about Republicans.

Their latest complaint, without a trace of irony, is that the Democrats are holding up George Bush's judicial nominations. Tucker Carlson complained on last Friday's Crossfire that even if they did do this very thing to us for eight years under President Clinton, that's no excuse for us to do it them now.

What my grandmother would say to this is that with one tochas, you can't dance at two weddings.

But Tucker is right, of course. We should not block Bush's judicial nominations simply because the Republicans blocked President Clinton's.

The reason we should block Bush's judicial nominations is that he has no mandate to appoint a bunch of right-wing judges in the first place.

Bush lost the popular vote by half a million votes. More than half of this country told Bush that they don't want him making ANY decisions for us, much less choosing ideological conservatives who will hand down decision after decision that will set precedents regarding the most important issues in the country, including abortion and voting rights.

For the same reason that the Republicans would scream bloody murder if the Democrats nominated Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson to the Supreme Court, they should refrain from proposing ultra-conservatives like Thomas Pickering. As Robert Bork's writings since his failed Supreme Court nomination have born out, we cannot afford to appoint ideological extremists who will use the judiciary as a work bench to hammer out and enact their political agendas. The Founding Fathers intended the judiciary to be a fair and impartial arbiter of laws, not a political activist community.

And Bush is not merely nominating moderate Republicans who believe in judicial restraint and a conservative interpretation of the Constitution. He is nominating severe right wingers who, if they had their druthers, would take their right-wing ideologies, which are opposed by the majority of Americans, and make them the law of the land. Judges who would, rather than interpret the Constitution, simply rewrite it to conform to their religious and political beliefs. The Establishment clause? We don't need no stinking Establishment clause. We follow the teachings of Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones.

Anybody who doubts this need only examine the Republicans who held up President Clinton's nominees for so long, such as Tom Delay, who recently said that he believes in a "biblical world view" and that he supported President Clinton's impeachment because Clinton "does not have the right world view."

It is reasonable to assume that Delay -- a member of the Council for National Policy (CNP), a theocratic organization which has as its stated policy "Christian Reconstructionism," the belief that the U.S. Constitution draws its authority from the Bible -- would support only those judicial nominees who share his biblical world view, one in which the Christian God is the one true God, and all you Jews and Muslims and atheists can just get knotted, the Constitution doesn't apply to you.

Using the Delay Constitution, we can conceive of a country in which only Protestant fundamentalists are allowed to vote, and a religious heathen only counts as three fifths of a human being.

Another reason to block Bush's nominations is that, according to David Brock's new book "Blinded by the Right," we have two Republican-appointed Supreme Court Justices, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, who perjured themselves during their confirmation hearings. Justice Thomas, Brock says, positively lied when he claimed not to have an opinion about abortion, and most likely lied when he stated that he did not make sexual advances on Anita Hill.

Chief Justice Rehnquist lied, Brock contends, when he claimed that he did not intimidate black voters when he was an election pollster in the 1960s. Brock's allegation against Rehnquist, by the way, is corroborated by John Dean in his new book "The Rehnquist Choice," and Dean ought to know. He was the White House official who engineered Rehnquist as President Nixon's nomination to the Supreme Court.

If these are the nominees the Republican party intends to continue sending us, maybe it is a good idea if we don't confirm any of them for awhile until they get the idea that lying has consequences. After all, what WILL we tell the children?

Another reason to block Bush's judicial nominations is that so many of these Republican-appointed judges seem willing to ignore the law to further their own conservative agendas.

Chief Justice Rehnquist, for instance, according to Joe Conason and Gene Lyons in "The Hunting of the President," ignored certain provisions of the Independent Counsel Act in order to appoint to the Special Division (the three-judge panel that appoints the Independent Counsel) Judge David Sentelle, a conservative ideologue (and also a member of the CNP) who earned his first judicial appointment from Ronald Reagan after campaigning heavily for Reagan and Jesse Helms.

A former Republican Party chairman in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, Sentelle had relatively little judicial experience; yet while the Independent Counsel Act directed the Chief Justice to give priority in appointing judges to the Special Division to senior circuit judges and retired justices, Rehnquist ignored this directive and instead appointed Sentelle, who he knew would fulfill what was expected of him: to appoint an Independent Counsel to investigate President Clinton who had what we might expect Rehnquist also felt was the correct world view.

Sentelle, of course, delivered. He appointed Ken Starr, who also had, no doubt, what Delay and Sentelle would consider the correct world view.

Maybe those folks who believe in the mythical men in black suits and mirrored sunglasses are not so crazy after all, only the Men in Black are not alien-hunters; they're card-carrying CNP Republicans, and what they hunt is Democrats.

In the Republican-judges-who-ignore-the-law department, we also have Florida Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls, who denied Al Gore's motion for hand counts of the ballots in election 2000, even though Florida law expressly calls for hand recounts in the case of a contested election. Gore, not a member of the CNP, no doubt did not have what Judge Sauls and the Republicans (and Jeb Bush, who is also a CNP member) would consider the correct world view.

And while we're on the subject of Judge Sanders Sauls, here's a question: what was Ken Hanner, Deputy Editor of the Washington Times, doing attending a June 2001 tribute to Judge Sauls hosted by Judicial Watch, the right-wing "legal watchdog" group that, under the helmsmanship of Larry Klayman (also a member of CNP), filed hundreds of frivolous lawsuits against President Clinton and his administration?

Isn't it reasonable to assume that if a Washington Times editor is a guest at a tribute for one of the men responsible for helping George Bush steal the presidency, that editor and that newspaper cannot possibly be fair and impartial as they claim to and are supposed to be?

That crash you just heard wasn't your imagination: it was the myth of the liberal media shattering into a million pieces.

And hey, isn't that Republican Congressman Howard Coble up there on that dais with Judge Sauls?

So let me get this straight: Judge Sauls made a fair and impartial ruling in Al Gore's election case and was completely uninfluenced by his connections to the Republican party, and yet a United States Congressman (who just happens to be a Republican) attended a tribute to Judge Sauls six months after the election in which Sauls ruled for the Republican candidate.

If anybody believes that, I've got an election to sell you.

But the most important reason to block Bush's judicial nominees is that if enough of these ideological conservatives were appointed, they could conceivably disregard the law, stop the vote counting in a national election, and maybe even thwart the will of the voters and appoint the President of the United States.

The Republicans say that we should at least bring these judicial nominations to a vote. Should we actually count these votes afterward or just let Antonin Scalia decide the winner? Should Theresa LePore design a special ballot? Should the judge with the least votes win?

Until the Republicans clean up their acts and learn to respect the Constitution they propose to uphold, maybe they SHOULD warm the bench for awhile, and not the judicial one, either.