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| Newt Gingrich is dangerous, or rather, his ideas are by Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS) 12/21/2011, 10:30am PST | ||||
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| Newt Gingrich has proposed the idea that he wants to hold "activist" judges responsible for their decisions. ("Activist judges", of course, is a code phrase meaning "judge who writes decisions I don't like.") I wrote on my blog in an article back in June of 2009 that this claim is total bullshit. Conservatives love activist judges, as long as they're activist in the way they want them to be.
But this is ridiculous. Gingrich claims if a judge made rulings he disagreed with, he conceivably might have them hailed before congress and grilled like some criminal at a Congressional hearing, then expected to justify their ruling, and possibly face impeachment if they can't. This is rank imperialistic fascism, where judges who don't toe the line of whatever political fashion is popular are subject to the legal equivalent of being put in the stocks for the community to look at them being humiliated, followed by being fired because someone in power disagrees with them. This isn't China, for chrissakes! We have remedies for judges who make bad rulings. It's called appeals courts, and rewriting the laws to correct flaws, and if nothing else, constitutional amendments. Impeachment is supposed to be reserved for judicial misconduct, not for disagreement over their opinions. Then he has an even more "interesting" idea for disposing of judicial opinions he disagrees with: ignoring them. So if a guy is arrested for capital murder, tried and convicted, and an appeals court overturns the conviction and death sentence, finding the trial court intentionally withheld evidence that the guy was tortured to make him confess, but the guy is a horrible slime who probably did it, that the answer is to ignore the decision and fry the guy anyway? Why even bother to have trials, let's just string people up that we think are guilty, if a few innocents die, that's the price we (or rather, they) pay to keep us safe! Another piece of garbage is his claim that judges have too much power. Again, total bullshit. Judges have no power at all. As a President back in the 19th Century once said when the Supreme Court made a decision he disagreed with and decided to ignore, if the Supreme Court wants to enforce its decisions, let it do so, "but where are its troops?" Courts only have power because they are considered "honest brokers": fair deciders of conflicts, and we will enforce their orders because we respect them. Courts have no power to enforce their decisions unless the executive branch agrees to do so, and uses its police or military to enable enforcement. |
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