Oh, did you think I meant impeachment of Bush?
No. Federal judges are being threatened with death, not just impeachment.
Glenn Greenwald has an excellent post on how the Bushites’ rhetoric gets more violent and dictatorial as their boy’s popularity goes down. And one of the ways it gets more dictatorial is in the increased calls for punishment of judges who don’t toe the party line, as Sandra Day O’Connor pointed out in a recent speech:
Sandra Day O’Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party’s rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary.
In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University, reported by National Public Radio and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Ms O’Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges.
Ms O’Connor, nominated by Ronald Reagan as the first woman supreme court justice, declared: “We must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary.”
She pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist countries as lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. “It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”
Look at some of the examples of this kind of rhetoric:
After the decision last March that ordered a brain-dead woman in Florida, Terri Schiavo, removed from life support, Mr DeLay said: “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour.”
Mr DeLay later called for the impeachment of judges involved in the Schiavo case, and called for more scrutiny of “an arrogant, out-of-control, unaccountable judiciary that thumbed their nose at Congress and the president”.
The trial judge in the Schiavo case, a conservative Republican appointee, was hounded from his church and threatened for doing the right thing.
She noted death threats against judges were on the rise and added that the situation was not helped by a senior senator’s suggestion that there might be a connection between the violence against judges and the decisions they make.
The senator she was referring to was John Cornyn, a Bush loyalist from Texas, who made his remarks last April, soon after a judge was shot dead in an Atlanta courtroom and the family of a federal judge was murdered in Illinois.
Senator Cornyn said: “I don’t know if there is a cause and effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country … And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence.”
Here are some other examples, from Pam (who wades through the Freeper boards so you don’t have to):
“Okay commandoes, here is your first patriotic assignment … an easy one. Supreme Court Justices Ginsburg and O’Connor have publicly stated that they use (foreign) laws and rulings to decide how to rule on American cases. This is a huge threat to our Republic and Constitutional freedom. … If you are what you say you are, and NOT armchair patriots, then those two justices will not live another week.”
– threat to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on a winger message board
And there’s more:
Ginsburg revealed in a speech in South Africa that she and O’Connor were threatened a year ago by someone who called on the Internet for the immediate “patriotic” killing of the justices. Security concerns among judges have been growing.
Conservative commentator Ann Coulter joked earlier this year that Justice John Paul Stevens should be poisoned. Over the past few months O’Connor has complained that criticism, mainly by Republicans, has threatened judicial independence to deal with difficult issues like gay marriage.
Worry is not limited to the Supreme Court. Three quarters of the nation’s 2,200 federal judges have asked for government-paid home security systems, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said this week.
Ginsburg said the Web threat was apparently prompted by legislation in Congress, filed by Republicans, that would bar judges from relying on foreign laws or court decisions.
“It is disquieting that they have attracted sizable support. And one not-so-small concern – they fuel the irrational fringe,” she said in a speech posted online by the court earlier this month and first reported Wednesday by LegalTimes.com.
Glenn’s got examples from somewhat cooler heads merely calling for Ginsburg’s impeachment for her speech in South Africa [to clarify -- the calls for impeachment are due to her advocacy of turning to international or foreign laws for guidance on novel issues, not for publicizing the death threats about such]. But then you have your Jerry Fallwells praying for Ginsburg’s cancer to return (such a nice, Christian man — guess it’s okay because she’s a Jew and going to Hell anyway).
A word about Coulter and her “joke” about poisoning Stevens. Yeah, real funny, Ann. Just like your “joke” that you only regret that Tim McVeigh didn’t hit the New York Times building. Stop it, you’re killing me. She’s a lawyer — went to my law school, in fact, so I know she’s no slouch intellectually. She knows exactly what she’s doing, so why haven’t the feds come and investigated her for making threats against a Supreme Court Justice?
Judges already have problems from wack-ass litigants who didn’t get what they wanted, like that guy in Chicago who killed a federal judge’s husband and mother because he was pissed off about a ruling. Why add fuel to the fire?
Culture of life, my ass.
This exemplifies one of my biggest fears about the rhetoric thrown about so carelessly in the media and other outlets. The ignorant, which make up a huge portion of our soceity, ignorant to understanding how this government is supposed to work and their role in it, are whipped up by powerful cons from the right.
It is like when some fool trains a pitbull as a guard dog, ruthlessly ratcheting up the tension for his own pleasure and power only to have it turn around and kill him.
The ring leaders among the wingers know damn well what they are doing. The have whipped fear, ignorance and alienation up to a frenzy to use for their own self interests, whether the church or the corporate denizens. I only hope the dog turns and bites them back with the same viciousness they have engendered.
The worse is that their efforts to deconstruct any shred of democracy in order to expedite their own interest will become successful as they increase the public’s complicity in the act. Then us Americans will suddenly understand why the Europeans so hate war.
Thank Gods for armchair “patriots.”
Going to be mildly sick now.