Dangerous attacks on the separation of powers

Attacks on the judiciary are turning ugly. In the last few weeks, we've seen a number of prominent conservatives advocate lawless disregard for judicial rulings, attack the rule of law as "judicial tyranny," and call for the mass impeachment of judges Senator John Cornyn of Texas went so far as to excuse violent attacks against judges by attributing them to conservative complaints about the judiciary:

I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country -- certainly nothing new; we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that has been on the news. I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence, certainly without any justification, but that is a concern I have that I wanted to share.

Now, Dana Milbank has a report on some even uglier rhetoric at a conservative conference attacking the judiciary (via Josh Marshall):

Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush's judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.

...Vieira, a constitutional lawyer who wrote "How to Dethrone the Imperial Judiciary," escalated the charges, saying a Politburo of "five people on the Supreme Court" has a "revolutionary agenda" rooted in foreign law and situational ethics. Vieira, his eyeglasses strapped to his head with black elastic, decried the "primordial illogic" of the courts.

Invoking Stalin, Vieira delivered the "no man, no problem" line twice for emphasis. "This is not a structural problem we have; this is a problem of personnel," he said. "We are in this mess because we have the wrong people as judges."

First Grover Norquist's obsession with Lenin, now Vieira's scary invocation of Stalin's totalitarianism. Who knew the Communists would have this kind of influence on Republican elites?

Update 4/10: Added Tom DeLay's call for the mass impeachment of judges to the list above.

Comments

[Taylor]

My problem is the way the media is spinning the topic re: the new conservative cabal coming out against Kennedy. This is not a battle between conservatives and the judicial branch, it's a battle between conflicting ideologies within the two groups.