“King Newt”: Why Not Just Call For Martial Law And Be Done With It?
There has been no shortage of wacky ideas from the Republican candidates, but Newt Gingrich’s attacks on the judiciary are truly far out on the lunatic fringe of right-wing politics.
At first he confined himself to merely railing against the independence of the judiciary, without which due process simply cannot exist. Recently, he’s started talking about arresting judges who issue rulings he doesn’t like. Intimidating judges used to be a criminal offense. Now it’s a campaign plank and a Sunday morning sound bite.
On the CBS News program “Face the Nation” yesterday, Mr. Gingrich said Congress should compel judges to testify about any decision that annoys the majority party on Capitol Hill. He said he would send U.S. Marshals to arrest them if they did not willingly come to testify. (Marshals, for what it’s worth, are charged with protecting federal judges, who get hundreds of death threats a year.) Mr. Gingrich is not the first politician to say shockingly inappropriate things about federal judges. In 2005, Tom DeLay, who was the Republican House Majority Leader, threatened retribution against the judges who ruled against his wishes in the Terri Schiavo case.
And that same year, John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, attributed episodes of courthouse violence to distress over judges who make “political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public.” This was shortly after a career criminal tried to shoot his way out of an Atlanta trial, killing the judge in the process. And after a deranged man murdered a Chicago judge’s mother and husband because the judge had dismissed his lawsuit.
But Mr. Gingrich takes the attack on the judiciary farther than any other national figure I’ve heard, at least since the Jim Crow days. He’s actually gone so far as to suggest Congress impeach uncooperative judges. Michael Mukasey, the former attorney general who served under George W. Bush, called Mr. Gingrich proposals “dangerous, ridiculous, totally irresponsible, outrageous, off the wall.”
Dangerous and irresponsible is right, for many reasons—but I’ll just give you two. One is that Mr. Gingrich’s proposal opens the door to Congress firing and hiring judges each time power changes hands between the political parties. Judges have lifetime terms to protect them from exactly this kind of pressure. Second, it would effectively eliminate the role of the Supreme Court as the ultimate arbiter of constitutionality.
Mr. Gingrich has referred several times to Thomas Jefferson’s elimination of federal judgeships at the turn of the 19th century. He presents that as an uncontroversial move, when in fact it was part of a highly partisan attempt to rescind his predecessor’s judicial appointments. He’s also fond of saying that the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, established during Jefferson’s presidency with the seminal case Marbury v. Madison, has been “grossly overstated.”
That statement alone should turnoff primary voters. Marbury v. Madison was a founding decision for a fledgling democracy that had shed its blood to get away from a law that was subject to the will and whim of a political figure—the King of England.
By: Andrew Rosenthal, The New York Times, December 19,2011
Newt Gingrich And His “Rock, Paper, Scissors” Constitution
The closer Newt Gingrich gets to the Republican nomination for president, the more unhinged become his attacks on the independence of the federal judiciary. In early October, when Gingrich was nowhere in the polls, he ginned up a patently unconstitutionalargument for subpoenaing judges to come before Congress to justify and explain what Gingrich considers their “radical” decisions. “The spectacle would be like a dog walking on its hind legs,” said Bruce Fein, the respected conservative attorney and former Reagan official, when asked about Gingrich’s plan. “You are surprised not that it is done ineptly, but that it is attempted at all.”
Now, leading most polls, but evidently still needing his own radical pitch, Gingrich has doubled down on his crackpottery. On Sunday morning, he told Bob Schieffer of CBS News’ Face The Nation that the Capitol police, or federal marshals, could and should come and arrest those judges if they refuse to respond in person to a subpoena seeking to publicly shame them for making unpopular decisions. He also delivered this shuddering version of the Constitution, an unfamiliar Rock-Paper-Scissors version, in which the promise of separation of powers is akin to a playground game:
Here’s the key — it’s always two out of three. If the president and the congress say the court is wrong, in the end the court would lose. If the congress and the court say the president is wrong, in the end the president would lose. And if the president and the court agreed, the congress loses. The founding fathers designed the constitution very specifically in a Montesquieu spirit of the laws to have a balance of power not to have a dictatorship by any one of the three branches.
Poof, just like that, the leading candidate’s “key” to nowhere. What Gingrich really is saying, under the guise of blasting “elitist” judges, is that the Bill of Rights would no longer be used to protect individual rights because the judges who help ensure those (often unpopular) rights can be outvoted by the White House and the Congress. In President Gingrich’s world, evidently, the Supreme Court would not have the final say on the law. The majority, as represented by the popularly elected branches, would have the ultimate vote. Not in every case, Gingrich says, just in some. Does that reassure you the way he meant it to?
Here’s the Face The Nation video from this morning in which Gingrich says “… there’s no reason the American people need to tolerate a federal judge who who is that out of sync with an entire culture….” http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7392048n
There are two possibilities for this level of jeremiad. Either Gingrich actually believes this nonsense, in which case he would be a constitutionally dangerous president, or he doesn’t, in which case he’s committing constitutional heresy just to win a few primary votes. Either way, it is conduct unbecoming a president. Close your eyes for a second and imagine if a Democratic candidate for the White House suggested that the judiciary be neutered by the White House and Congress; if a “liberal” running for president suggested that individual liberties and minority rights would hereafter be defined by Washington. Wouldn’t Gingrich be first in line with his pitchfork and torch?
You don’t need to be a lawyer, politician or scholar to hear the contradictions in Gingrich’s latest argument. He’s against “elitist” judges but not against the lobbyist-infused Washington insiders who would overrule them. He rails on the 9th Circuit for its Pledge of Allegiance ruling as though it were the law of the land (it is not, as your school-age child is likely to tell you). Similarly, he picks on a federal trial in judge in Texas whose school prayer ruling was almost immediately overturned on appeal. Small beer, indeed, for the monumental remedies Gingrich seeks; it’s like destroying the whole house to get rid of a few nagging flies.
“I think part of the advantage I have is that I’m not a lawyer,’ Gingrich told Schieffer. “And so as a historian, I look at the context of the judiciary and the constitution in terms of American history.” The fact that Gingrich is not a lawyer helps explain why he sounds so ignorant about the law. The fact that he is an historian helps explain why he’s hanging much of his theory on some hoary precedent involving Thomas Jefferson, the slave owner, who eliminated 18 of 35 judges back in his day. Never mind the constitutional precedent and practice of the intervening 200 years, Gingrich’s argument goes, it happened once so it should happen again.
I cited Judge Johnson above not just because his quote is a timely reminder to demagogues like Gingrich that they are often responsible for the very “activism” they decry. Judge Johnson, as a federal trial judge in Alabama from 1955-1979, essentially devoted his entire judicial life to helping to ensure that black citizens would gain the basic civil rights that governors and state legislators and the Congress and the White House would not give them. Imagine how many times Judge Johnson would have been called onto the carpet on Capitol Hill under a Gingrich Administration. On which side of that history would you want to be?
The last word goes to Fein, the proud Reaganite. On Sunday afternoon, he called Gingrich’s ideas “more pernicious to liberty than President Franklin Roosevelt’s ill-conceived and rebuked court-packing plan.” More colloquially, Fein told me in October when Gingrich first went off the rails on this issue: “This is crazy. It would bring us back to the pre-Magna Carta days… The idea that these legislators, who haven’t read the Constitution or their own statutes, are going to lecture federal judges about the law is ridiculous. It’s juvenile. It’s high school stuff.” Indeed—and thus perfect for a bumper-sticker: Your Constitution: Rock, Paper, Scissors, Newt.
By: Andrew Cohen, The Atlantic, December 18, 2011
Why Americans Think Politics Is Corrupt
After living in Massachusetts, I left the Northeast for the first time to go to grad school at the University of Minnesota. While I lived in the Twin Cities, the Democratic Farmer-Labor Gov. Wendell Anderson was re-elected to a second term. At the beginning of his new term, the governor created a crisis in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes by making one of his money guys a member of his cabinet.
Coming from Massachusetts and being used to the hurly burly of Bay State politics, I found this scandal surprising. After all, back home there would have been an uproar if the governor hadn’t appointed his financial contributor to the cabinet. But Scandinavians brought a good government ethic to Minnesota. Massachusetts is Massachusetts. In the Bay State political deals are sealed with cash. The last three speakers of the Massachusetts House of Representatives have all been convicted of corruption.
In the last couple of decades, American politics has become a lot more like Massachusetts politics and a lot less like Minnesota’s. There was a time, long ago and far away when people frowned on the appearance of impropriety. Now politicians don’t even seem to care about actual impropriety.
Political pursuit of the almighty dollar is why voters have so little trust in Congress to do the right thing. As a radio talk show host, I hear over and over again from my listeners that legislators are in the tank with big business. I don’t share this skepticism since I have worked with many men and women of great integrity as a political consultant. But perception is reality in politics and as long as people believe that politicians are trading their votes for cash, Americans won’t have any confidence in Congress. And in a democracy, the process will only work if the people trust the system.
The only effective way to restore public trust in politics is to get big money out of the system. The best solution would be public funding of campaigns. But that’s not realistic now since the Supreme Court opened the financial floodgates last year in its infamous Citizens’ United decision. Because of the Court’s ruling, voters will be at the receiving end of a hurricane of violently negative campaign ads over the next year which will destroy whatever is left of public trust in government.
The next best remedy to restored trust in government is to force the networks and individual TV and radio stations to give free time to political candidates. The networks receive billions of dollars in federal freebies every fiscal year since stations do not have to pay for the right to use public airwaves. It’s time for the media to make the same kinds of sacrifices that working families are making to keep this country strong.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, December 2, 2011
Are Evangelicals A National Security Threat?
If you have the stomach to listen to enough right-wing talk radio, or troll enough right-wing websites, you inevitably come upon fear-mongering about the Unassimilated Muslim. Essentially, this caricature suggests that Muslims in America are more loyal to their religion than to the United States, that such allegedly traitorous loyalties prove that Muslims refuse to assimilate into our nation and that Muslims are therefore a national security threat.
Earlier this year, a Gallup poll illustrated just how apocryphal this story really is. It found that Muslim Americans are one of the most — if not the single most — loyal religious group to the United States. Now, comes the flip side from the Pew Research Center’s stunning findings about other religious groups in America (emphasis mine):
American Christians are more likely than their Western European counterparts to think of themselves first in terms of their religion rather than their nationality; 46 percent of Christians in the U.S. see themselves primarily as Christians and the same number consider themselves Americans first. In contrast, majorities of Christians in France (90 percent), Germany (70 percent), Britain (63 percent) and Spain (53 percent) identify primarily with their nationality rather than their religion. Among Christians in the U.S., white evangelicals are especially inclined to identify first with their faith; 70 percent in this group see themselves first as Christians rather than as Americans, while 22 percent say they are primarily American.
If, as Islamophobes argue, refusing to assimilate is defined as expressing loyalty to a religion before loyalty to country, then this data suggests it is evangelical Christians who are very resistant to assimilation. And yet, few would cite these findings to argue that Christians pose a serious threat to America’s national security. Why the double standard?
Because Christianity is seen as the dominant culture in America — indeed, Christianity and America are often portrayed as being nearly synonymous, meaning expressing loyalty to the former is seen as the equivalent to expressing loyalty to the latter. In this view, there is no such thing as separation between the Christian church and the American state — and every other culture and religion is expected to assimilate to Christianity. To do otherwise is to be accused of waging a “War on Christmas” — or worse, to be accused of being disloyal to America and therefore a national security threat.
Of course, a genuinely pluralistic America is one where — regardless of the religion in question — we see no conflict between loyalties to a religion and loyalties to country. In this ideal America, those who identify as Muslims first are no more or less “un-American” than Christians who do the same (personally, this is the way I see things).
But if our politics and culture are going to continue to make extrapolative judgments about citizens’ patriotic loyalties based on their religious affiliations, then such judgments should at least be universal — and not so obviously selective or brazenly xenophobic.
By: David Sirota, Salon, November 29, 2011
Congratulate Yourself: Celebrate National Act Like Congress Day
If you’re disgusted with Washington, don’t bother complaining. Instead, do what they do.
The next time your boss assigns you some work, make a big show of trying really hard, then earnestly explain that despite months of effort and intense deliberations, you just couldn’t get it done. Despite your failure, express your sincere belief that the unfinished work cannot be left to the next generation to solve, along with your profound hope that somebody else will find a way to tackle the job. Then congratulate yourself for thinking about blazing a trail that somebody else may actually blaze someday.
Eventually, we’ll have an official holiday called National Act Like Congress Day, when everybody in America will show up for work and have a jolly good time doing nothing important. Maybe it will be truly authentic, and last an entire month, or quarter, or year.
But getting there will take dozens of committee hearings, a required minimum of 25 Face the Nation panel discussions, and the approval of Grover Norquist. So until then, it will have to be a citizens’ movement, kind of like Occupy Wall Street with a water cooler.
Until it catches on, there may be some opposition from the obsessively productive and the miserably accountable. So if your boss complains about the congressional pace of your work, question his patriotism and call him a socialist. Or a fascist, if that seems to fit his personality better. Send off-the-record E-mails to Politico describing how your boss’s inflexibility assured from the outset that you’d be unable to complete your assignment. Go on TV in a nice suit so that people know you looked good while you were failing.
If you are the boss, and you run the company, stop worrying so much about meeting revenue and profitability targets. Call your customers. Explain that, in the national spirit, you’ll still be showing up for work regularly (except for the January retreat, the January recess, President’s Week, the March recess, the Passover/Easter fortnight, the week of Memorial Day, the week of July 4, the whole month of August, the early fall recess, the mid-fall recess, the mid-late fall recess, Thanksgiving week, and most of December) but your output will be limited to official golf outings, commentary on other people’s official golf outings, and directing staff to attend meetings. Encourage them to golf with you and have their staff meet with your staff, under careful direction, of course.
Parents, your moment has arrived. When the kids pester you about making dinner or playing with them, make pained expressions while explaining that you understand how important those things are. It’s just that, right here, right now, isn’t the right time for you to be meeting their needs. Reassure them that you’ll establish a study group to explore other ways for their needs to be met, and get back to them in five or 10 years.
Kids, follow in the sizeable footsteps of your parents and your elected leaders. You don’t really have to perform well at school and get along with other kids. Those are just empty slogans. All you really need to do is establish a tactical advantage over your adversaries, and everything else will fall into place. So don’t worry about math or biology or geography or climatology or economics. That’s all bogus science that doesn’t matter in real life anyway. But read Ayn Rand and make sure you run for student council, and remember that it’s never too early to go negative against your opponent.
If you hear people complaining about how we can’t afford to “waste” time by putting off needed action, have the courage to disregard them. The world is full of hysterical people who don’t understand how special America is. We have tremendous natural advantages and if anybody can afford to waste time, it’s us. In fact, we practically have a moral obligation to the rest of the world to give them a chance to catch up with us. A level playing field is in everybody’s interest, so enlarging our debt, handicapping our productivity, and dumbing down our kids is the right thing to do.
But don’t let anybody call you lazy. That’s an insult! Our descendants worked incredibly hard to build this country, decades ago. We are now resting on their behalf. The media is always getting lathered up over some crisis, so above all, remember this: It’s only a crisis if it affects you. Somebody, somewhere, always has a problem, and it’s un-American to go around trying to solve all of them. People need to learn to stand on their own two feet, and until they do, the rest of us should stop working so hard.
After all, it’s time to prepare for the winter recess.
By: Rick Newman, U. S. News and World Report, November 23, 2011
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