Tom Daschle thinks "people are amused and wondering why the Senate isn't working on more important things" than trying to get President Bush's federal judge nominees confirmed--nominees whose confirmations have been hijacked by leftists who claim that said nominees are too conservative for mainstream America. Daschle and company seem to think it's worth ignoring the Constitutional method of confirming justices, which requires a simple majority in the Senate instead of the leftist-imposed 60-vote majority; but, now that the cameras are rolling, they're playing it down as an unimportant issue. So what's important to them?
They'd rather spend their time spending your money than dealing with a pressing issue of long-term importance. They want to revamp, rather than phase out, Medicare--more money down that drain. They want to work on an "energy policy" so the federal government can muck around with private industry. They want to process eight overdue spending bills, which undoubtedly contain enough pork to cover the continental US with three feet of bacon (as a side note, most of the "conservatives" in Congress have done nothing to curb spending, but that's another issue). Are these things really more important than putting mentally sound, constructionist justices on the federal bench?
Have you been following the Roy Moore case? You know, the "Ten Commandments" judge who has been defrocked because he had the audacity to place a Ten Commandments monument in the Alabama State Courthouse--the same Ten Commandments that are engraved on the United States Supreme Court building. Remember the big hullabaloo over "one nation under God" in California? The simple fact of the matter is that the courts now control our laws, and a significant percentage of justices have no problem rewriting or ignoring parts of the Constitution as they see fit.
Thus, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects" means "you can murder an unborn child." Likewise, "the right of the people, to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" means "only certain government-authorized people can keep and/or bear certain government-authorized arms at certain government-authorized times and places." Also, "The powers not delegated...are reserved to the States" means "the Federal government is in charge of everything, and don't you forget it."
Our legislature refuses to expend the political capital necessary to impeach out-of-line judges, and as a result the final legislative authority in America resides in a runaway judiciary. Outside of impeachment, the only way to halt this flagrant attack on our legal system, and in fact our very way of life, is to confirm justices who will fulfill their oath to defend the Constitution instead of rewriting it to suit their personal legislative agenda. If we don't make it happen, then might as well kiss our "Constitutional Republic" goodbye forever, and start calling it the "Pseudo-Constitutional Oligarchy" that it really is.
You will recall that the Senate unanimously denounced the "anti-Pledge" justices on the Ninth Circuit as crazy, reciting the pledge in a big PR stunt on the steps of the Capitol. So what happens when the President sends them a group of solid, well-respected, highly qualified nominees who will not hand down the same sort of boneheaded decisions as the Ninth Circuit? They filibuster them. Typical leftist hypocrisy. Do we expect anything else?
Given that they are acting just as we expect them to act, are the leftists really the problem? No. The problem is the conservatives. The Republican leadership doesn't have the spine to make the Dems engage in a true filibuster; the best they can do is the lame "talk-a-thon" junk. They don't have the spine to simply say "no" to the unconstitutional 60-vote requirement, confirm the nominees with 51 votes, and ignore the protestations of the leftists. Simply put, an unconstitutional Senate rule, just as an unconstitutional law, is null and void, and should be ignored. The sad fact of the matter is that, with the exception of a few guys like Ron Paul, our Congress is filled with shoddy excuses for statesmen who checked their brain, their integrity, and their testosterone at the Beltway (I'm pretty sure Hillary has more testosterone than all the Republican leadership put together). President Bush still seems to have possession of his testosterone etc., but he has thus far refused to take advantage of his ability to appoint justices during Congressional recesses; I'm sure he has his reasons, but if he's truly more concerned with getting good judges on the bench than with playing politics, he should use every tool at his disposal to put them there.
Posted by jon at November 14, 2003 09:55 AM