[Mb-civic] In Contempt of Courts By Max Blumenthal, The Nation

[Michael Butler]

AlterNet
In Contempt of Courts
By Max Blumenthal, The Nation
Posted on April 12, 2005, Printed on April 13, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21740/

Michael Schwartz must have thought I was just another attendee of the
"Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" conference. I approached the chief
of staff of Oklahoma's GOP Sen. Tom Coburn outside the conference in
downtown Washington last Thursday afternoon after he spoke there. Before I
could introduce myself, he turned to me and another observer with a crooked
smile and exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to
impeach judges. I want to impale them!"

For two days, on April 7 and 8, conservative activists and top GOP staffers
summoned the raw rage of the Christian right following the Terri Schiavo
affair, and likened judges to communists, terrorists and murderers. The
remedies they suggested for what they termed "judicial tyranny" ranged from
the mass impeachment of judges to their physical elimination.

The speakers included embattled House majority leader Tom DeLay,
conservative matriarch Phyllis Schlafly and failed Republican senatorial
candidate Alan Keyes. Like a performance artist, Keyes riled the crowd up,
mixing animadversions on constitutional law with sudden, stentorian salvos
against judges. "Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was the focus of evil
during the cold war. I believe that the judiciary is the focus of evil in
our society today," Keyes declared, slapping the lectern for emphasis.

At a banquet the previous evening, the Constitution Party's 2004
presidential candidate, Michael Peroutka, called the removal of Terri
Schiavo's feeding tube "an act of terror in broad daylight aided and abetted
by the police under the authority of the governor." Red-faced and sweating
profusely, Peroutka added, "This was the very definition of state-sponsored
terror." Edwin Vieira, a lawyer and author of How to Dethrone the Imperial
Judiciary, went even further, suggesting during a panel discussion that
Joseph Stalin offered the best method for reining in the Supreme Court. "He
had a slogan," Vieira said, "and it worked very well for him whenever he ran
into difficulty: 'No man, no problem.'"

The complete Stalin quote is, "Death solves all problems: no man, no
problem."

The threatening tenor of the conference speakers was a calculated tactic. As
Gary Cass, the director of Rev. D. James Kennedy's lobbying front, the
Center for Reclaiming America, explained, they are arousing the anger of
their base in order to harness it politically. The rising tide of threats
against judges "is understandable," Cass told me, "but we have to take the
opportunity to channel that into a constitutional solution."

Cass' "solution" is the "Constitution Restoration Act," a bill relentlessly
promoted during the conference that authorizes Congress to impeach judges
who fail to abide by "the standard of good behavior" required by the
Constitution. If they refuse to acknowledge "God as the sovereign source of
law, liberty, or government," or rely in any way on international law in
their rulings, judges also invite impeachment. In essence, the bill would
turn judges' gavels into mere instruments of "The Hammer," Tom DeLay, and
Christian-right cadres.

Conference speakers framed the Constitution Restoration Act in
pseudo-populist terms--the only means of controlling a branch of government
hijacked by a haughty liberal aristocracy against the will of the American
people. As Michael Schwartz remarked during a panel discussion, "The Supreme
Court says we have the right to kill babies and the right to commit buggery.
They say the people have no right to express themselves, that the people
have no right to make laws. Until we have a court that reflects a majority,"
Schwartz continued, his voice rising steadily, "it is a sick and sad joke
that we have a Constitution here."

The right wing claims that judges should reflect majority opinion. But what
is the majority opinion? After DeLay and Senate majority leader Bill Frist
passed special bills ordering federal courts to consider the reinsertion of
Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, according to a Gallup poll, Congress's public
approval rating sank to 37 percent, lower than at any time since shortly
after Republicans impeached President Bill Clinton. Meanwhile, 66 percent of
respondents to a March 23 CBS News poll thought Schiavo's feeding tube
should be removed. The notion that the Christian right's agenda is playing
well in Peoria must be accepted on faith alone.

The recent right-wing fixation on impeaching judges was conceptualized by
David Barton, Republican consultant and vice chairman of the Texas GOP. In
1996 Barton published a handbook called "Impeachment: Restraining an
Overactive Judiciary," which was timed to coincide with Tom DeLay's bid for
legislation authorizing Congress to impeach judges. "The judges need to be
intimidated," DeLay told reporters that year.

In 1989 Barton published a book titled The Myth of Separation, which
proclaims, "This book proves that the separation of church and state is a
myth." The Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, in a critique of his
1995 documentary America's Godly Heritage, stated that it was "laced with
exaggerations, half-truths, and misstatements of fact." Barton is on the
board of advisers of the Providence Foundation, a Christian
Reconstructionist group that promotes the idea that biblical law should be
instituted in America. In 1991 Barton spoke at a Colorado retreat sponsored
by Pastor Pete Peters, an adherent of racist Christian Identity theology
with well-established neo-Nazi ties. During the 2004 presidential campaign,
the Republican National Committee hired him as a paid consultant for
"evangelical outreach." The RNC sponsored more than 300 events for him.

DeLay's bill, based on Barton's writings, failed due to lack of GOP support.
But the judicial impeachment campaign was reignited six years later when a
federal court ordered the removal of then-Alabama Supreme Court Chief
Justice Roy Moore's Ten Commandments monument from courthouse grounds. In
February 2004 a group of about 25 enraged ministers and movement leaders
gathered in Dallas to plot a new response. The Constitution Restoration Act
was the result. According to Moore, he was a principal author, along with
Herb Titus, the former dean of Pat Robertson's Regent University law school,
and Howard Phillips, a veteran third-party activist whose U.S. Taxpayers'
Party served as a vehicle for the antigovernment militia movement during the
1990s. All three men stalked the halls of the downtown Marriott last
Thursday and Friday.

In the Senate the bill was sponsored by Richard Shelby, a senator from Roy
Moore's home state; among the co-sponsors is Senator Sam Brownback of
Kansas, who is contemplating a run for the Republican nomination for
President. The bill was introduced on March 3, before the Terri Schiavo
affair erupted, before Florida Circuit Judge George Greer ordered the
removal of her feeding tube and before he became the poster-child for the
right's judicial impeachment campaign.

Now, according to Howard Phillips in a speech to the conference, his "good
friend" Wisconsin GOP Rep. James Sensenbrenner is planning to hold hearings
on the Constitution Restoration Act in the House. DeLay, who appeared on a
big screen during a Thursday morning session to call for the removal of "a
judiciary run amok," has put his name on the act as the House sponsor.

The Schiavo case remains the flashpoint for the right. That was apparent at
a Thursday evening banquet honoring the lead attorney for Terri Schiavo's
parents, David Gibbs. After a breathless introduction from Peroutka, who
called the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube "an act of terror," Gibbs
confidently strode to the lectern while a crowd of about 100 regaled him
with a thunderous standing ovation. Baby-faced, with his hair molded tightly
against his scalp and clad in a well-tailored navy blue suit, Gibbs
maintained a cool disposition during his speech, presenting a sharp visual
contrast to the wildly gesticulating, bedraggled figures who held the
microphone throughout most of the conference. But Gibbs' impeccable
appearance and measured tone were not enough to mask the lurid nature of his
speech.

First, Gibbs suggested that Schiavo fell into a persistent vegetative state
not because of an eating disorder but as the result of "some form of
strangulation or abuse at the hands of her husband, possibly." Then, Gibbs
asserted that after Schiavo's parents were awarded millions of dollars by
the state to provide for her care, Michael Schiavo "began moving against the
family to kill his wife." These claims, however, did not hold up in court
because, as Gibbs explained, "a judge that never went to see [Schiavo] was
the judge who made the decision that her life did not matter."

As members of the audience gasped, Gibbs painted a vivid portrait of Schiavo
in her hospital bed. "Terri Schiavo was as alive as anyone you see sitting
here," he said. "She liked my voice. It was loud and deep and she would roll
over and try to talk back." But after Judge Greer "literally ordered her
barbaric death," everything changed.

Gibbs described his visit to Schiavo's hospital room after her feeding tube
had been removed. Schiavo lay in bed "with her eyes sunken deep in her head
... she was skeletal," Gibbs recounted. "Then she turned to her mother
suddenly, like she wanted to speak, and she just started sobbing." By now,
members of the audience were crying.

As soon as he left the stage, one of the event's planners asked all the men
in the room to get down on the floor and pray. With no other choice, I moved
my plastic-upholstered chair aside, took to my hands and knees and listened
as plaintive voices arose all around me with prayers for Schiavo's parents
and maledictions against judicial tyranny. A saccharine version of
Pachelbel's Canon emanating from the player piano in the hotel lobby seeped
through the banquet hall's open doors, suffusing the ceremony with a
dreamlike atmosphere. When I finally dared to look up from the ground, I
realized that my head was only inches from an enormous posterior belonging
to William Dannemeyer, the former congressman who once issued a letter to
his colleagues listing 24 people with some connection to Bill Clinton who
died "under other than natural circumstances."

As the conference attendees filed out of the banquet hall and into the
rain-flecked night, mostly silent except for the few who were still sobbing,
they seemed prepared to do anything--absolutely anything--against judges. "I
want to impale them!" as Michael Schwartz told me.

"This isn't Colombia. This isn't drug lords terrorizing the judiciary. It's
America," Florida Judge George Greer declared recently. Greer remains under
police guard.

On Monday, April 11, at Sen. Frist's invitation, David Barton will lead him
and other senators on an evening tour of the Capitol, offering "a fresh
perspective on our nation's religious heritage."
© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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