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CounterPunch
November
12, 2002
Bush's Judges
by KURT NIMMO
Now, with the election over -- and with the distinct
possibility that the most reactionary and destructive government
in American history will lord over our lives -- we can sit back
and watch in horror as they take the nation down the path to
forever war and domestic repression.
Pointlessly, before the last election
-- possibly the last semi-free election we will be allowed --
I urged people to vote for unpalatable Democrats. I didn't do
this because I am in love with Democrats. I have said for years
Democrats and Republicans are two sides of the same tarnished
coin -- a coin minted by a system long ago purchased by transnational
corporations and a tiny mega-wealthy elite. I had one reason
and one reason only in mind when I asked people to vote for the
admittedly corrupt and debased Democrats:
A wide open federal judiciary.
Federal judicial appointments are for
life. After a religious rightwing nutcase is dropped in there,
he or she will stick around long after senility kicks in. That's
why I wanted people to vote for the Spineless Ones, because they
have consistently turned back Dubya's reactionary and troglodytic
court nominations. Now that the Senate is firmly -- possibly
forever -- in Republican control, we can expect Bush to reintroduce
nominations rejected by Democrats. In fact, within hours of the
election dust settling, the Bushites indicated they would do
so in a trice.
Since less than a third of eligible voters
bothered to get off their asses and vote, here's who you'll get
on the federal bench and what it means for your future.
Charles W. Pickering,
Sr.
Originally nominated to the Court of
Appeals, 5th Circuit, Pickering was rejected by Democrats because
he's a good ol' boy racist and hate-monger from Mississippi.
Dubya's daddy appointed him to the U.S. District Court for the
Southern District of Mississippi in 1990.
As a student at the University of Mississippi,
he published a law review article advising how Mississippi's
statute imposing criminal penalties for interracial marriages
could be strengthened to make it fully enforceable. Later, as
a state senator, he cast several votes impeding the full extension
of electoral opportunities to African-Americans (maybe he gave
Jeb Bush a few lessons on this).
Pickering also testified at his 1990
district court hearing that he had never had any contact with
the state Sovereignty Commission, a notorious state-funded agency
established after the Supreme Court's landmark decision in Brown
v. Board of Education to investigate civil rights advocates and
block integration efforts. But according to a 1972 memo in the
recently-released Sovereignty Commission records, then-state
Senator Pickering had "requested to be advised of developments"
regarding a Commission investigation into union organizing activities
in his hometown.
Pickering hates women's rights and reproductive
freedom. As a state senator, he voted for a constitutional convention
to overturn Roe v. Wade
Pickering is so reactionary, so neo-fascist,
that even conservative appellate court judges have reversed him
-- notably, for disregarding controlling precedent on constitutional
rights and for improperly denying people access to the courts
-- on a number of occasions.
On the day after the midterm election,
Bushite aides said Dubya would renominate Pickering. He is expected
to renominate Priscilla R. Owen of Texas, as well.
Priscilla R. Owen
On September 5, 2002, the Senate Judiciary
Committee rejected the nomination of Justice Priscilla R. Owen
to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. So opposed is Owen to reproductive
rights that fellow Texas conservative justice Alberto Gonzales
accused her of "unconscionable judicial activism" in
abortion cases.
Owens is a member of the Federalist Group,
a cabal of neo-fascists -- who are often politely referred to
as "ultra-conservatives" -- in opposition to "orthodox
liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society,"
which the group in its anti-pinko paranoia believes dominates
law schools and the legal profession. Justice Owen is described
by the Texas Lawyer as part of a bloc that "anchors the
conservative end" of a very conservative state supreme court.
"Owen's sixteen-year career in private
practice was devoted almost entirely to the representation of
oil and gas companies," writes the Alliance for Justice
"In eight of the ten cases Justice Owen lists in her Senate
Judiciary Committee Questionnaire as her most significant, she
represented oil and gas companies."
In other words, she a perfect selection
for the Cheney-Bush Oil administration.
Owen is 48, which means, when Bush finally
renominates her and the Senate Judiciary Committee gives her
a thumb up, it is possible she could be screwing up your life
for three or four decades to come. If you're a woman, look forward
to going back to a time when women surrendered the reproductive
parts of their bodies to the state.
"In the longer term, Mr. Bush should
have more freedom to choose conservative nominees to fill any
increasingly likely Supreme Court vacancies in the next two years,"
writes the New York Times. "The president has said he would
seek to choose someone in the mold of two of the most conservative
justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas."
Antonin Scalia, appointed by Reagan,
is just the kind of Christian fanatic Bush thinks should be sitting
in judgment of our liberty and lives. Scalia, not unlike the
two fundamentalist nutcakes Robertson and Falwell -- or, for
that matter, Osama bin Laden -- believes his ethnocentric God
works through its "minister," the state. "The
reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to
obscure the divine authority behind government should not be
resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively
as possible," Scalia told the University of Chicago Divinity
School in January. "Indeed, it seems to me, that the more
Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death
penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian
Europe, and has least support in the churchgoing United States.
I attribute that to the fact that for the believing Christian,
death is no big deal."
Especially if it is other people -- the
poor, people of color, the mentally deficient -- who are facing
death.
As an African-American, Clarence Thomas
must be living in a world of denial. It's no secret that the
Republicans are not exactly user-friendly when it comes to equal
rights and desegregation. Both Attorney General John Ashcroft
and Asa Hutchinson, head honcho over at the DEA, have connections
with Bob Jones University, which as fought desegregation over
the years. One has to wonder, as well, what Scalia thinks of
Bob Jones University they consider Catholicism Satanism
and believe the Pope is the living embodiment of the Anti-Christ.
More denial, I imagine.
As Christian Dewar has pointed out, several
prominent Republicans are linked to the Southern Partisan, a
racist magazine that has characterized former KKKer David Duke
as the "American Ideal," and slaveholders as concerned
about the "peace and happiness" of their slaves.
Not only should Clarence Thomas be concerned
about the big fat racist streak running through the Republican
Party, but so should Condolezza Rice and Colin Powell. Or maybe
Rice and Powell believe the stubborn Southern racism embedded
in the Republican Party is reserved for poor black people only.
Denial, with a capital D.
But the Supreme Court is not the prize.
It only decides a small number of cases. The Supreme Court has
opted in recent years to take up fewer and fewer cases, which
means that for most Americans the court of last resort is a circuit
court of appeals."The federal judiciary has an enormous
effect on the lives of every American, whether people realize
it or not," Elizabeth Dahl of the Constitution Project in
Washington told the Christian Science Monitor. "Only a small
percentage of the decisions they make will ever be reviewed by
a higher court -- civil rights, employment law, the environment,
states' rights, civil liberties issues, they are all at stake
here."
We had a chance on November 5 to make
sure the far right relgious wacko Republicans didn't stack the
courts. It's too late now. Sure, the Democrats may filibuster
-- and since they are mostly hot air, such a stalling debate
may go on for a while -- but at the end of the day they are doomed.
The republicans have the numbers. It's their dog and pony show
-- and the dog will surely bite us in the ass while the pony
kicks us in the teeth.
Or, as that self-aggrandizing, often
annoying Democratic operative James Carville said after the Republicans
took the election:
"The American people just don't
have a clue as to what's coming."
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
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