Republicans after Judges, Want to End the Rule of Law.

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post describes the more outrageous behavior of some of the Republican religious right. They are now out to get Justice Anthony Kennedy. Then they want to end the Rule of Law and require every American to believe in God.

Some well-known conservative leaders met Friday to decide how to "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny." Their decision was that Kennedy should be impeached, or worse.

Phyllis Schlafly, Michael P. Farris, and Edwin Vieira agreed that Kennedy should be impeached. Vieira added that his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' “ according to Milbank.

Milbank continues with this explanation of Vieira’s statement “The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem."

From there Milbank’s article gets even scarier. This is his description: The conference was organized during the height of the Schiavo controversy by a new group, the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. This was no collection of fringe characters. The two-day program listed two House members; aides to two senators; representatives from the Family Research Council and Concerned Women for America; conservative activists Alan Keyes and Morton C. Blackwell; the lawyer for Terri Schiavo's parents; Alabama's "Ten Commandments" judge, Roy Moore; and DeLay, who canceled to attend the pope's funeral.

The Schlafly session's moderator, Richard Lessner of the American Conservative Union, opened the discussion by decrying a "radical secularist relativist judiciary." It turned more harsh from there.

Schlafly called for passage of a quartet of bills in Congress that would remove courts' power to review religious displays, the Pledge of Allegiance, same-sex marriage and the Boy Scouts. Her speech brought a subtle change in the argument against the courts from emphasizing "activist" judges -- it was, after all, inaction by federal judges that doomed Schiavo -- to "supremacist" judges. "The Constitution is not what the Supreme Court says it is," Schlafly asserted.
Former representative William Dannemeyer (R-Calif.) followed Schlafly, saying the country's "principal problem" is not Iraq or the federal budget but whether "we as a people acknowledge that God exists."

Farris then told the crowd he is "sick and tired of having to lobby people I helped get elected." A better-educated citizenry, he said, would know that "Medicare is a bad idea" and that "Social Security is a horrible idea when run by the government." Farris said he would block judicial power by abolishing the concept of binding judicial precedents, by allowing Congress to vacate court decisions, and by impeaching judges such as Kennedy, who seems to have replaced Justice David H. Souter as the target of conservative ire. "If about 40 of them get impeached, suddenly a lot of these guys would be retiring," he said.

Vieira, a constitutional lawyer [Huh?? - RB] who wrote "How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary," escalated the charges, saying a Politburo of "five people on the Supreme Court" has a "revolutionary agenda" rooted in foreign law and situational ethics.
[...]

Invoking Stalin, Vieira delivered the "no man, no problem" line twice for emphasis. "This is not a structural problem we have; this is a problem of personnel," he said. "We are in this mess because we have the wrong people as judges."

[Underlining is mine – RB]

Besides Vieira, Phyllis Schafly is also a lawyer. They should know better.

They have it wrong, of course. Their problem with the courts is that the courts are following the Rule of Law with the basic law being the Constitution of the United States, and the Supreme Court interprets the law based on the nearly 1000 year old English Common Law (this is the set of precedents that upsets Farris so much). Since they don’t like the results of the Rule of Law, then they are going after the judges.

This is a shift from the previous conservative attacks on "Activist Judges." Now it is the religious right attacking the entire courts system together with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Tom DeLay has been railing about judges for years, as edwardpig points out. Tom DeLay is well known for his views that America has problems because the schools teach Evolution instead of Creationism. That tells you where he comes from.

Since they decided they elected George W. Bush last Fall, and consider him one of their own, they are really feeling their oats. They're in their own fantasyland. They don't realize that most Americans are not ready to drink their koolaide, but if they keep pushing like this there is going to be real trouble.

Kevin Drum and The Debate Link have more on the conference.