Republicans' new 'judicial activism': a coup d'etat of state supreme courts
Republicans' new 'judicial activism': a coup d'etat of state supreme courts
America's independent and impartial judiciary is under threat from a rightwing attempt to pack courts with partisan placemen
Diane Roberts
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 October 2012 17.11 EDT
Roy Moore thinks he's been called to put God back where God belongs: in the classroom, in the bedroom and in the courtroom. Moore is a former chief justice of the Alabama supreme court, first elected in 1999. He holds that Jesus is good, taxes are bad, abortion is really bad and the state should use its power to punish homosexuality, which he called a "criminal lifestyle".
Moore was booted off the court in 2003, falling foul of the constitutional prohibition against government-endorsed religion. As chief justice, he'd parked a two-ton Ten Commandments stone monument in the doorway to the state judicial building and refused to move it.
Now, Moore's back, lamenting what he sees as our catastrophic moral decline, warning that secularism, gay marriage and the teaching of evolution will inevitably lead to sharia law and trying to get reinstated. Since Alabama is both rock-hard Republican and churchier-than-thou, Moore has a real shot at getting elected again.
Win or lose, he is Exhibit A in a growing trend of politicisation of the American judiciary.
More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/08/republicans-judicial-activism-supreme-courts
MinM
(2,650 posts)Judge Oliver Diaz from "Hot Coffee"
Here's more from Diane Roberts' must read piece...
Diane Roberts
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 October 2012 17.11 EDT
...The Republicans' biggest target this year is the Florida supreme court specifically, Justices Peggy Quince, R Fred Lewis and Barbara Pariente, who must win a majority of votes to keep their seats. Lewis and Pariente were appointed by Lawton Chiles, Florida's last Democratic governor; Quince, one of two African Americans on the seven-member court, was chosen jointly by Chiles and incoming Republican Governor Jeb Bush. She and Pariente are the court's only women.
For the first time ever, the Republican party of Florida (RPOF), aided by their Tea Party shock troops, is mounting a concerted campaign against specific justices. RPOF pretends this is some grassroots effort, an outburst of populist anger at a bunch of out-of-touch liberal judges. But the power (and the money) behind the effort comes from an outfit called Americans for Prosperity, funded by the Koch brothers.
The play here is to create three shiny new vacancies on Florida's highest court, which would be filled by Tea Party poster boy Governor Rick Scott. This is a rightwing wet dream: a forelock-tugging, corporation-loving, quiescent court, which would ignore inconveniences such as the Clean Water Act and the 14th Amendment, and never get in the way of the free market.
"Merit retention" of judges is supposed to be a mechanism for citizens to rid the courts of the incompetent and the unethical. No one accuses Quince, Lewis and Pariente of incompetence or unethical practices. The best Republicans can do is call them "judicial activists", a meaningless phrase they throw at any jurist who rules against them. The great Brown v Board of Education decision in 1954, the one which declared segregation unconstitutional that's judicial activism. Handing the presidency to George W Bush on the dodgiest of legal theories in Bush v Gore is high-minded and statesman-like...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/08/republicans-judicial-activism-supreme-courts
MinM
(2,650 posts)http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/08/republicans-judicial-activism-supreme-courts
jsr
(7,712 posts)It's part of their plan.