Rock Bottom (Greenhouse)
Now that another highly qualified judicial nominee has been left as road kill, the question is how much lower can the confirmation process sink. . .
Just when news on the judicial front could not get more discouraging, I came across something truly bizarre, a position paper by the new front-runner among Republican presidential candidates, Newt Gingrich. Under the title “Bringing the Courts Back Under the Constitution,” Mr. Gingrich launches a 28-page attack on “lawless judges” who need to be reined in “if we are going to retain American freedoms and American identity.”
The document, he writes, “serves as political notice to the public and to the legislative and judicial branches that a Gingrich administration will reject the theory of judicial supremacy and will reject passivity as a response to Supreme Court rulings that ignore executive and legislative concerns and which seek to institute policy changes that more properly rest with Congress.” By rejecting passivity, Mr. Gingrich means impeaching judges for “unconstitutional” rulings or, failing to muster the two-thirds majority necessary for impeachment, simply abolishing their positions.
Much of the document is a grab bag of long familiar right-wing talking points (Judges who acknowledge foreign law? A threat to “American sovereignty!”) It is also just plain sloppy, misspelling Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s name throughout. But truly head-spinning is the tenuous hold that this screed, from a onetime history professor, has on American history.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/rock-bottom/
