Saturday, April 09, 2005

Whose court would you rather be in -- Kennedy, or Delay?

And the Verdict on Justice Kennedy Is: Guilty
These people are mentally ill.
They need help. Now. They need to go away to the funny farm for a while or take a pill or talk to a good psychiatrist, or all three.
It isn't the judges that need to be stopped. It is these people.
Now they think they're going to impeach a Supreme Court Justice because he dared to change his mind on juvenile executions between 1988 and now, to write the majority decisionto stop the execution of teenagers, a practice which every other country in the world, except Somalia, has already abandoned. And they think it is outrageous judicial overreach to even mention in the decision that the US is lagging behind every other country on the planet in this regard. How uhpatriotic. Maybe its not the decision, its the implied insult they're reacting to -- gee, you mean you think some of our state legislatures are twenty years behind the times, led by a bunch of rednecks? How dare you insult our good ole boys!
Not only that, but Kennedy had the temerity to write that juveniles, because they were younger and less mature, should be given the chance to grow up -- "the state cannot extinguish his life and his potential to attain a mature understanding of his own humanity". Well, age hasn't helped to bring maturity to the people attending this conference, has it.
And in the same issue of the Washington Post is an article by a judge talking about violence toward judges, including references to the recent violence and to earlier mail bombs. Judge Roth wants congress to give more funds to the US Marshalls Service to protect judges better. Well, how convenient -- the wingnuts now know that all they have to do to intimidate judges is to dismantle the US Marshalls.
Problem solved I guess.
Or else they can adopt the Stalin solution they kept talking about at the conference -- "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem" The Supreme Court had better keep checking its mail.
It would, I suppose, be too much to expect that Bush would issue some kind of statement condemning these wingnuts -- they are, after all, his base, and so he must not dare to tell them they're wrong.
Besides, they might turn on him, next.
UPDATE: Digby has more. "It's not that these judges are "liberal activists" --- the main players in the Schiavo matter were conservative republicans, for God's sake. It's that the Republican legislatures both state and federal want to blame the judiciary for the fact that they cannot deliver on these repugnant, unamerican, demands from their extremist religious right constituency. They want something that . . . Republican judges and Democrats all agree is unconstitutional. They want to destroy an independent judiciary so they can pass unconstituional laws on a purely partisan basis with no review."

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