Newt, the Courts and Doomsday

14 December 2011 |permalink | email article

Gingrich, who believes he’s already won the Republican presidential nomination, is in full battle dress. Now, as a recent New York Times opinion piece suggested, he’s taking the “activist judges” phrase –jurists who rule in ways that the right wing does not like—from a normal attack on the justice system to a stunning new low. He’s not fazed by McCarthyist tactics to smear judges and is floating a scheme to challenge “judicial supremacy”, which has racial overtones. A President Gingrich would break the balance of power that is fundamental to American democracy. The plan centerpiece is an attack on the landmark 1958 ruling in Cooper v.Aaron, in which the Supreme Court reaffirmed that Arkansas had a duty to follow federal law. The governor maintained said he was not bound by the court’s call for desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education. All nine justices, for the first time in history, unanimously signed the unanimous opinion. They did so to stress that the “chaos, bedlam and turmoil” caused by the governor’s refusal to obey the law was “intolerable. In Gingrich’s crazed view, Congress and the executive branch have cowered for too long before the court. If Gingrich and Congress were to decide that rulings of specific federal judges were unconstitutional, they could flaunt the Constitution’s guarantee. Gingrich also would drag judges before Congress “to explain their constitutional reasoning.” If Gingrich had his way, a Supreme Court that ordered an end to racist segregation policies would become a puppet of the political branches.

What They Said

“I’m almost certain that the Romney people and others are going to roll out more grenades on Speaker Gingrich, I think we’re in about the third inning here between the Iowa caucuses.” Democratic strategist James Carville.

“I think people recognize that I’m not a partisan Republican, that I’m someone who is a moderate, and my views are progressive. And that I’m gong to work for our senior citizens, for people who have been left behind…”—A clip from Mitt Romney in 2002 when he was running for governor of Massachusetts which might have been innocuous then but not in the post-Glenn Beck era when the word “progressive” is a Republican boogieman.

“People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz.”—Newt Gingrich, with an obsession about the Apocalypse and a doomsday vision, sees himself with a central role in the world-historical drama. “I see evil around me every day. We are at the edge of losing this civilization, adding that America might not survive an electro-magnetic pulse and nuclear attack from Iran

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