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You are here: Home / And The Assault on the Judiciary Continues

And The Assault on the Judiciary Continues

by John Cole|  March 31, 20051:17 pm| 11 Comments

This post is in: Outrage

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Tom DeLay, today:

Judicial activists killed Terri Schiavo, and they will pay.

That’s the message House Majority Leader Tom DeLay delivered a few minutes ago in his statement on the death of Terri Schiavo. DeLay said that Schiavo died because the legal system did not protect her, then he declared that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior…”< Appearing on CNN this morning, Focus on the Family's James Dobson seemed to suggest that Congress reconsider the entire structure of the federal judicial system. Noting that the Constitution created the Supreme Court but left Congress with the authority to "ordain and establish" the lower courts, Dobson said members of Congress have "all sorts of power in dealing with the courts, but they haven't had the political gumption to do it." For example, Dobson said, Congress could simply "take away the franchise" of the left-of-center U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit "and then reestablish it the next day," presumably with more conservative judges in place.

Yes. That James Dobson. Really, though. Despite the thinly veiled and not-so-thinly veiled threats to dismantle the judiciary and remake it in God’s image, we have nothing to worry about.

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11Comments

  1. 1.

    BumperStickerist

    March 31, 2005 at 2:04 pm

    ummm .. John, you’ve got a full bullgoose case of Sullivanentia here.

    “the time time will come” stuff in the context of bible thumping usually means that *God* will express His views on court-sanctioned euthanasia.

  2. 2.

    John Cole

    March 31, 2005 at 2:11 pm

    Then why not just say:

    “These people will have to the Lord for their sins>”

    DeLay has no problem invoking the name of God whenever it tickles his fancy. He didn’t invoke God here because he intends to do something about it. Plus, you don;t take what he says in a vacuum- this past two weeks has been nothing but hostility towardsa the judiciary from DeLay.

    Finally- this was not a euthanasia case. They didn’t put her down. They didn;t give her a shot to kill her. They didn’t execute her.

    They merely quit the extraordinary measure of feeding her and hydrating her through a feeding tube- a denial of medical treatment that anyone of us is well within our rights to have honored. What is at issue here is the contention that she would have wanted to refuse the treatment. The courts, several witnesses, and Michael Schiavo believe she did.

    Tom DeLay, Bo Gritz, Randall Terry, and Sean Hannity think she didn’t.

  3. 3.

    Jorge

    March 31, 2005 at 3:13 pm

    http://www.glennbeck.com/al/index.shtml

    “What happened to Christian unity? Aren

  4. 4.

    ppgaz

    March 31, 2005 at 3:54 pm

    Apparently it has never occurred to these “religous” types that praying (that is, whining) for divine guidance is a total cop out. They might try learning to take responsibility for their own choices, do their own struggling with the conundrae …. instead of waiting to see what the “christian” mob tells them to do.

    As for these disgusting morons making threats against judges, politicians …. I’d say, for now, let them shriek. What they say can, and will, be used against them. Let them display themselves in full shrieking regalia. It will make great campaign commercial footage.

    Just make sure the cameras and the tape recorders are rolling as they foam at the mouth.

  5. 5.

    Jorge

    March 31, 2005 at 4:31 pm

    Hi Ppgaz,
    I’m not sure if the praying as whining remark was meant in reference to the editorial I posted. If it helps, you can look at prayer as a form of meditating on an issue. I pray daily and I can asure you that I don’t do it in order to avoid making my own choices. I do it it to find the clarity I need to make my own choices. When I pray about a problem, a concern or an issue, I get a very strong “answer” that is usually very clear. When I first prayed on the Schiavo issue, I got a strong sense of “she’s alive.” With more prayer, I also got a strong sense that God had been calling this woman home for over 15 years. I realized that feeding tube exists because of our fear of death and not because God has any need for us to live beyond our natural biological life cycle.

    If it makes secularists more comfortable to think that the reason that this happens is because I am entering a meditative state in which the Biblical teachings that I have received and my life experiences are easier to process, good. I won’t pretend to know how God created us and it might well be that the way he answers prayers was worked out when he created humanity and gave us brains.

  6. 6.

    ppgaz

    March 31, 2005 at 4:50 pm

    Of course, my (always slightly caustic) remarks are aimed at the truly crazy, not at sane people who just pray — as it sounds like you do. Crazy, in the sense that having gotten their “answer” (whatever they take that to mean) they then decide that “their” answer is the only correct answer and that any other answer is evil, and comes from Satan. Which is why I think of them as crazy, because the depth of solipsism involved there is beyond my comprehension.

    I do not consider myself “religious” in any sense, and I am agnostic (i.e., wishy washy) about the whole idea … but I do pray once in a while. Usually for someone else to be relieved of some burden or pain. I figure that it is untoward to pray for myself.

    No offense was meant to the prayerful, in general. Just to the people who think “their” prayers and “their” enlightenments are special, divine, and assigned rights the rest of us don’t have. Them, I consider crazy.

  7. 7.

    disinherited

    March 31, 2005 at 8:54 pm

    DeLay is a menace to the body politic and needs to be contained. Fortunately, his greatest menace is to his own party and I’m guessing they will try to contain him.

    As to the “threat,” I do not think DeLay means to personally threaten anyone, but I definitely do believe he chose his words so as to carry maximum appeal to the bloodthirsty among his base.

  8. 8.

    the friendly grizzly

    April 1, 2005 at 11:58 am

    I find it strange that so many on the right thought of Judge Birch as a hero, properly interpreting the law when he found Alabama could ban sex toys. And they were right.

    Now that this very same judge can find no legal basis for the intervention the Schindlers and their supporters wanted, he is transformed into an “arrogant”, “activist member of the judiciary”.

  9. 9.

    TM Lutas

    April 2, 2005 at 12:30 am

    The facts are that some judges have far exceeded their mandate and have been doing so for decades in manners that are only slowly being repaired. When a farmer was told that he was subject to federal regulation due to the interstate commerce clause of the US Constitution because grain he raised on his own farm was “illegally” used to feed his own animals, this was absurd, yet it was the law of the land for decades and the overexpansive use of the Commerce clause still hasn’t completely died out.

    The Terri Schiavo case isn’t just some bolt from the blue but rather the straw that broke the camel’s back on judicial activism.

    The last pebble went on the mountainside and now the slide has started. Sane, sober people have been warning for decades that there will come a day when the judiciary was going to be reined in, hard. It’s coming, and the grand conservative coalition can all have a hand in it or it’s going to be a process dominated by the cultural conservatives.

    Jesse Jackson, Tom Harkin, Ralph Nader, and a bunch of other liberals spoke out in favor of Terri Schiavo having her tube reinserted and receiving water and food. When you thunder on about “theocons”, reconcile those names with your accusation.

  10. 10.

    ppgaz

    April 2, 2005 at 10:56 am

    The truth, Lutas, is that the right fears and detests process of anky kind. Legal process, scientific process … any process.

    Process asks questions, challenges authority, rejects dogma, refuses to be browbeaten by politics, religion, or mob rule.

    It’s why you live in a republic, and not a democracy. It’s why there is a separation of powers between three branches of government. It’s why courts adjudicate.

    Your vague citation of a putative case law example, out of millions of possible examples, is just political hucksterism.

    The fact is that you will either live under the rule of duly considered laws and duly adjudicated matters before those laws, or you will live under some form of tyrrany. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

    Please describe the “mandate” to courts, where you found it, and why you are better qualified than anyone else to judge it?

  11. 11.

    wild bird

    April 4, 2005 at 10:16 pm

    And these are the same activists judges who would bloack a hospital to save a endangered bug or block the exicution of a convected killer and then allow a person to starve this is why we need to remove these judges from the courts and especialy the 9th curcutt court

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