Reply #45: Here's what Dean desires in judges:

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Our Government Needs Good Citizens
by Thom Hartmann
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In July of 1997, Vermont governor Howard Dean announced that he wanted to appoint to the Vermont Supreme Court a justice who would consider "common sense more important than legal technicalities" and "quickly convict guilty criminals."

It’s probably a testimonial to the good job public education has done in Vermont that there wasn’t a public uprising against him (although the Montpelier newspaper’s letters-to-the-editor section was filled with invective for several weeks). Certainly this is a statement that would not have been acceptable to the people who made Vermont the second independent Caucasian-run nation in North America (after Texas). The founding fathers of Vermont, which dropped its independent-nation status to become the USA’s 14th state in 1779, knew all too well the dangers of a government unconstrained by the "technicalities" of the law. They’d seen it when the British forced them to house soldiers, shot or hung them for speaking out against the King, and allowed them to engage in commerce or own property only if they gave a portion of their wealth to England. They realized that the government has most of the guns and all the power, and that it’s only "legal technicalities" which keep any government at bay. They fought and many of them died to put those "technicalities" into place. When politicians like Dean call for "swift and certain conviction of the guilty" (which actually means "swift and certain conviction of the accused, since a person is only guilty when they’ve been convicted…at least as of the date of this writing) in the courts of the state "regardless of technicalities," I imagine our founding fathers roll over in their graves.
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