Posted on 11/27/2003 4:43:32 AM PST by yoe
WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on the Constitution took to the Senate floor Tuesday to criticize his Democrat colleagues over the content of leaked memos regarding President Bush's judicial nominees.
Cornyn recalled an April 2003 letter that all 10 freshmen senators wrote to the leadership asking for a fresh start in the judicial nomination process.
Cornyn warned, "Any tactic or strategy used by a partisan minority now to obstruct President Bush's nominees, if successful, if allowed to proceed, will no doubt be sought to be used in the event a Democrat takes the White House and Republicans find themselves in the minority."
The partisanship has instead worsened, he pointed out, resulting in an unprecedented six simultaneous filibusters of nominees who would be confirmed by a bipartisan majority of the Senate.
His criticism was not only for the tactics employed, but also for the influence outside groups have on the process. Sen. Cornyn pointed out that while Democrats demanded and got an investigation into how memos from the Judiciary Committee were leaked to the press, they have yet to answer for the memos' content.
Cornyn recited several examples of how the credibility of the process has been called into question. He pointed to one internal memorandum, dated November 2001, that showed liberal special interest groups urged Senate Democrats to oppose the nomination of Miguel Estrada "because he has a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment."
Cornyn noted that despite the claims of Estrada's opponents that ethnicity played no part in their obstruction, "this memo makes clear -- or at least adds credence to the argument that but for his ethnicity Miguel Estrada would be on the Federal bench today."
Cornyn referenced another memo, dated November 7, 2001, in which Democrat staffers asked the question, "Who to fight?" The memo targeted Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, because "she is from Texas and was appointed to the Supreme Court by Bush, so she will appear parochial and out of the mainstream."
The senator from Texas said, "They decided to use the terms 'parochial' and 'out of the mainstream,' and to suggest that simply because she was from Texas, she could be cast in an ignorant and unfair stereotype, which should never be appropriate, even in discussing judicial nominees."
An April 2002 memorandum that detailed a plan to affect the outcome of the University of Michigan affirmative action case particularly troubled Cornyn. According to one memorandum, Elaine Jones of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund "would like the committee to hold off on any Sixth Circuit nominees until the University of Michigan case regarding the constitutionality of affirmative action and higher education is decided en banc by the Sixth Circuit."
Sen. Cornyn said, "The memo writer appears to have understood that such tactics were highly improper but chose to proceed with those plans anyway."
Cornyn noted that the memorandum expressed concern about the propriety of scheduling hearings based on the resolution of a particular case but went on to say, "Nevertheless, we recommend that Sixth Circuit nominee Julia Scott Gibbons be scheduled for a later hearing."
He deplored the use of "vicious ad hominem character attacks" in which leading Democrat senators have publicly called President Bush's judicial nominees everything from turkeys and Neanderthals, to kooks, selfish, despicable, and mean.
Cornyn chastised the Democrats' written memos which describe the nominees as "ugly, heartless ... Nazis."
He stressed that the importance of the battle of judicial nominees is evidenced when "unelected, lifetime-tenured judiciary make decisions based on dubious constitutional grounds that would never enjoy the support of the vast majority of the American people." Cornyn points to the "under God" ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals as an example.
The senator from Texas was equally troubled by several Supreme Court Justices' remarks that indicated their belief that the decisions of other countries' courts should be persuasive authority in America's courts when interpreting American law.
Cornyn asked the question, "What would James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson -- what would our Founding Fathers say about what is happening in our Federal Judiciary today?"
He answered it himself when he said, "We all know the answer. They would be shocked. We should be shocked as well."
In the next election, vote these bums out of office and put someone in who means what they swear to.
Well, their obstructionism surely helped relegate them back to their natural position -- the minority -- last year.
That, and the Wellstone funerally (putting the "fun" back into funerals).
Cornyn asked the question, "What would James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson -- what would our Founding Fathers say about what is happening in our Federal Judiciary today?"
He answered it himself when he said, "We all know the answer. They would be shocked. We should be shocked as well."
Tell you what, John, I agree with you. However, unlike you I am not a US Senator. But you are (in fact you're my Senator, and I helped put you into office), and that means that you can do something about it. How about, at the very least, calling these Justices to testify before your committee, and to explain themselves? Better yet, how about starting impeachment proceedings? After all, all of the Justices took an oath to preserve, protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, not some ever-changing, foreign set of anti-American PC ideas. That would be adequate grounds to toss their butts out of the Supreme Court in my book. Even if impeachment never actually occurred, or even the actual hearings, the credible threat that they might would be a huge deterrent to such thinking by current and future Justices.
So, John, are you just spouting off for the public, or are you really upset about this enough to do something about it? This constituent fervently hopes the answer is the latter.
It's time to start conducting unofficial submissions of impeachment for federal judges on the Internet. We have seen that impeachment is a rigged political process, not to be entrusted to our elected legislative officals. I believe that the American people can handle it themselves, through our only avenue of public expression.
Of course, the government will flip off the results, but they'll flip us off anyway, so what's the difference? The information will be out there, and they absolutely cannot countenance ANYONE gainsaying their unelected-for-life will. :-)
Judges: Should they be Elected or Appointed? by David Barton
...As part of that plan, the Framers took care to ensure that judges were accountable to the people at all times. Although federal judges were appointed and did not face election, the Founders made certain that federal judges would be easily removable from office through impeachment, a procedure that today is widely misunderstood and rarely used. While the current belief is that a judge may be removed only for the commission of a criminal offense or the violation of a statutory law, [3] it was not this way at the beginning. As Alexander Hamilton explained, "the practice of impeachments was a bridle" [4] — a way to keep judges accountable to the people. And what did the Framers believe were impeachable offenses?
According to Justice Joseph Story, a "Father of American Jurisprudence" [author of "COMMENTARIES ON THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES"]:
The offences to which the power of impeachment has been and is ordinarily applied. . . . are what are aptly termed political offences, growing out of personal misconduct, or gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard of the public interests. [5]
Under the Framers, impeachment occurred whenever a judge attempted to carry a personal agenda through the court; but today impeachment has become what Justice Story warned that it should never be: a power "so weak and torpid as to be capable of lulling offenders into a general security and indifference." [6] The federal judiciary, because it now enjoys a level of insulation from the people that the Framers never intended and to which they today would vehemently object, is unafraid to reshape American culture and policy to mirror its own political whims and personal values...
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