I haven't blogged on this issue yet and I should have. Fortunately the good folks over at the All Spin Zone kicked me in the butt and reminded me that I need to.
The recent rise in rhetoric about bad things happening to judges who don't make the "Right" decisions (and I use that in both senses of the word) is very troubling. Without a fair and honest judiciary, one that can make decisions without fear that they'll be second-guessed by someone with a gun, this country is in big trouble (if it isn't already).
Here's a key point, from a WaPo piece on a recent gathering of conservative leaders in Washington DC:
...lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [SCOTUS Justice] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary.
Indeed.
