[Mb-civic] this is what theocracy looks like

Thu Apr 14 17:42:43 PDT 2005

AlterNet
In Contempt of Courts
By Max Blumenthal, The Nation
Posted on April 12, 2005, Printed on April 14, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21740/

Michael Schwartz must have thought I was just another attendee of the 
"Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference. I approached the 
chief of staff of Oklahoma's GOP Sen. Tom Coburn outside the 
conference in downtown Washington last Thursday afternoon after he 
spoke there. Before I could introduce myself, he turned to me and 
another observer with a crooked smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! 
I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale 
them!"

For two days, on April 7 and 8, conservative activists and top GOP 
staffers summoned the raw rage of the Christian right following the 
Terri Schiavo affair, and likened judges to communists, terrorists and 
murderers. The remedies they suggested for what they termed "judicial 
tyranny" ranged from the mass impeachment of judges to their 
physical elimination.

The speakers included embattled House majority leader Tom DeLay, 
conservative matriarch Phyllis Schlafly and failed Republican 
senatorial candidate Alan Keyes. Like a performance artist, Keyes riled 
the crowd up, mixing animadversions on constitutional law with 
sudden, stentorian salvos against judges. "Ronald Reagan said the 
Soviet Union was the focus of evil during the cold war. I believe that 
the judiciary is the focus of evil in our society today," Keyes declared, 
slapping the lectern for emphasis.

At a banquet the previous evening, the Constitution Party's 2004 
presidential candidate, Michael Peroutka, called the removal of Terri 
Schiavo's feeding tube "an act of terror in broad daylight aided and 
abetted by the police under the authority of the governor." Red-faced 
and sweating profusely, Peroutka added, "This was the very definition 
of state-sponsored terror." Edwin Vieira, a lawyer and author of How to 
Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary, went even further, suggesting during a 
panel discussion that Joseph Stalin offered the best method for reining 
in the Supreme Court. "He had a slogan," Vieira said, "and it worked 
very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty: 'No man, no problem.'"

The complete Stalin quote is, "Death solves all problems: no man, no 
problem."

The threatening tenor of the conference speakers was a calculated 
tactic. As Gary Cass, the director of Rev. D. James Kennedy's 
lobbying front, the Center for Reclaiming America, explained, they are 
arousing the anger of their base in order to harness it politically. The 
rising tide of threats against judges "is understandable," Cass told me, 
"but we have to take the opportunity to channel that into a 
constitutional solution."

Cass' "solution" is the "Constitution Restoration Act," a bill relentlessly 
promoted during the conference that authorizes Congress to impeach 
judges who fail to abide by "the standard of good behavior" required by 
the Constitution. If they refuse to acknowledge "God as the sovereign 
source of law, liberty, or government," or rely in any way on 
international law in their rulings, judges also invite impeachment. In 
essence, the bill would turn judges' gavels into mere instruments of 
"The Hammer," Tom DeLay, and Christian-right cadres.

Conference speakers framed the Constitution Restoration Act in 
pseudo-populist terms--the only means of controlling a branch of 
government hijacked by a haughty liberal aristocracy against the will of 
the American people. As Michael Schwartz remarked during a panel 
discussion, "The Supreme Court says we have the right to kill babies 
and the right to commit buggery. They say the people have no right to 
express themselves, that the people have no right to make laws. Until 
we have a court that reflects a majority," Schwartz continued, his voice 
rising steadily, "it is a sick and sad joke that we have a Constitution 
here."

The right wing claims that judges should reflect majority opinion. But 
what is the majority opinion? After DeLay and Senate majority leader 
Bill Frist passed special bills ordering federal courts to consider the 
reinsertion of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, according to a Gallup poll, 
Congress's public approval rating sank to 37 percent, lower than at any 
time since shortly after Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton. 
Meanwhile, 66 percent of respondents to a March 23 CBS News poll 
thought Schiavo's feeding tube should be removed. The notion that the 
Christian right's agenda is playing well in Peoria must be accepted on 
faith alone.

The recent right-wing fixation on impeaching judges was 
conceptualized by David Barton, Republican consultant and vice 
chairman of the Texas GOP. In 1996 Barton published a handbook 
called "Impeachment: Restraining an Overactive Judiciary," which was 
timed to coincide with Tom DeLay's bid for legislation authorizing 
Congress to impeach judges. "The judges need to be intimidated," 
DeLay told reporters that year.

In 1989 Barton published a book titled The Myth of Separation, which 
proclaims, "This book proves that the separation of church and state is 
a myth." The Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, in a critique of 
his 1995 documentary America's Godly Heritage, stated that it was 
"laced with exaggerations, half-truths, and misstatements of fact." 
Barton is on the board of advisers of the Providence Foundation, a 
Christian Reconstructionist group that promotes the idea that biblical 
law should be instituted in America. In 1991 Barton spoke at a 
Colorado retreat sponsored by Pastor Pete Peters, an adherent of 
racist Christian Identity theology with well-established neo-Nazi ties. 
During the 2004 presidential campaign, the Republican National 
Committee hired him as a paid consultant for "evangelical outreach." 
The RNC sponsored more than 300 events for him.

DeLay's bill, based on Barton's writings, failed due to lack of GOP 
support. But the judicial impeachment campaign was reignited six 
years later when a federal court ordered the removal of then-Alabama 
Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore's Ten Commandments 
monument from courthouse grounds. In February 2004 a group of 
about 25 enraged ministers and movement leaders gathered in Dallas 
to plot a new response. The Constitution Restoration Act was the 
result. According to Moore, he was a principal author, along with Herb 
Titus, the former dean of Pat Robertson's Regent University law 
school, and Howard Phillips, a veteran third-party activist whose U.S. 
Taxpayers' Party served as a vehicle for the antigovernment militia 
movement during the 1990s. All three men stalked the halls of the 
downtown Marriott last Thursday and Friday.

In the Senate the bill was sponsored by Richard Shelby, a senator 
from Roy Moore's home state; among the co-sponsors is Senator Sam 
Brownback of Kansas, who is contemplating a run for the Republican 
nomination for President. The bill was introduced on March 3, before 
the Terri Schiavo affair erupted, before Florida Circuit Judge George 
Greer ordered the removal of her feeding tube and before he became 
the poster-child for the right's judicial impeachment campaign.

Now, according to Howard Phillips in a speech to the conference, his 
"good friend" Wisconsin GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner is planning 
to hold hearings on the Constitution Restoration Act in the House. 
DeLay, who appeared on a big screen during a Thursday morning 
session to call for the removal of "a judiciary run amok," has put his 
name on the act as the House sponsor.

The Schiavo case remains the flashpoint for the right. That was 
apparent at a Thursday evening banquet honoring the lead attorney for 
Terri Schiavo's parents, David Gibbs. After a breathless introduction 
from Peroutka, who called the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube "an 
act of terror," Gibbs confidently strode to the lectern while a crowd of 
about 100 regaled him with a thunderous standing ovation. Baby-
faced, with his hair molded tightly against his scalp and clad in a well-
tailored navy blue suit, Gibbs maintained a cool disposition during his 
speech, presenting a sharp visual contrast to the wildly gesticulating, 
bedraggled figures who held the microphone throughout most of the 
conference. But Gibbs' impeccable appearance and measured tone 
were not enough to mask the lurid nature of his speech.

First, Gibbs suggested that Schiavo fell into a persistent vegetative 
state not because of an eating disorder but as the result of "some form 
of strangulation or abuse at the hands of her husband, possibly." Then, 
Gibbs asserted that after Schiavo's parents were awarded millions of 
dollars by the state to provide for her care, Michael Schiavo "began 
moving against the family to kill his wife." These claims, however, did 
not hold up in court because, as Gibbs explained, "a judge that never 
went to see [Schiavo] was the judge who made the decision that her 
life did not matter."

As members of the audience gasped, Gibbs painted a vivid portrait of 
Schiavo in her hospital bed. "Terri Schiavo was as alive as anyone you 
see sitting here," he said. "She liked my voice. It was loud and deep 
and she would roll over and try to talk back." But after Judge Greer 
"literally ordered her barbaric death," everything changed.

Gibbs described his visit to Schiavo's hospital room after her feeding 
tube had been removed. Schiavo lay in bed "with her eyes sunken 
deep in her head ... she was skeletal," Gibbs recounted. "Then she 
turned to her mother suddenly, like she wanted to speak, and she just 
started sobbing." By now, members of the audience were crying.

As soon as he left the stage, one of the event's planners asked all the 
men in the room to get down on the floor and pray. With no other 
choice, I moved my plastic-upholstered chair aside, took to my hands 
and knees and listened as plaintive voices arose all around me with 
prayers for Schiavo's parents and maledictions against judicial tyranny. 
A saccharine version of Pachelbel's Canon emanating from the player 
piano in the hotel lobby seeped through the banquet hall's open doors, 
suffusing the ceremony with a dreamlike atmosphere. When I finally 
dared to look up from the ground, I realized that my head was only 
inches from an enormous posterior belonging to William Dannemeyer, 
the former congressman who once issued a letter to his colleagues 
listing 24 people with some connection to Bill Clinton who died "under 
other than natural circumstances."

As the conference attendees filed out of the banquet hall and into the 
rain-flecked night, mostly silent except for the few who were still 
sobbing, they seemed prepared to do anything--absolutely anything--
against judges. "I want to impale them!" as Michael Schwartz told me.

"This isn't Colombia. This isn't drug lords terrorizing the judiciary. It's 
America," Florida Judge George Greer declared recently. Greer 
remains under police guard.

On Monday, April 11, at Sen. Frist's invitation, David Barton will lead 
him and other senators on an evening tour of the Capitol, offering "a 
fresh perspective on our nation's religious heritage."

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