|
WORD COUNT
662
JUNE 22, 2005
BETTER STAY OUT OF
FEDERAL COURT – by Donald Kaul
Last
week the U.S. Senate confirmed the appointment of Janice Rogers Brown to
the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, perhaps the most
influential appellate court after the Supreme. She is, by all accounts,
a remarkable woman.
She
is African-American and as her supporters never tire of pointing out, a
sharecropper’s daughter who overcame early widowhood and single
motherhood to work her way through college and UCLA law school. She
maneuvered her way through the political thickets of California to
become, eventually, an associate justice on the California Supreme
Court.
She
is said to write poetry, read widely and her speeches are peppered with
quotations by such as Cicero, Ayn Rand, Samuel Beckett and Chris
Rock---that crowd. She is, in short, a practically perfect candidate for
an important judicial appointment. She has but a single flaw; hardly
worth mentioning, but I’ll mention it anyway.
She’s
nuts.
She
is a raving conservative lunatic who not only grasps the most extreme
right-wing views available to her, she dips them in blood and waves them
around like flags. She has said in speeches, for example, that the New
Deal, with its emphasis on regulation of business and help for the
disadvantaged, has brought upon us a new slavery.
“In
the heyday of liberal democracy all roads lead to slavery,” she has
said. “We no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. If we can
invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is
inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy---a license to steal, a
warrant for oppression.”
She
found a 1937 Supreme Court ruling allowing federal regulation of the
workplace particularly egregious, calling it a “triumph of our own
socialist revolution.”
“Where government moves in, community retreats and civil society
disintegrates. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds
moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.” She apparently
wants a return to the pre-New Deal era---bread lines, child labor,
unfettered stock market manipulation. Those were the days.
Still, that wasn’t what bothered me most about Judge Brown. People say
extreme things in speeches all of the time; I’ve done it myself. Nor was
it the fact that in cases involving discrimination against minorities or
women that have come before her, she seems most often to favor the
discriminators rather than their victims. There are two sides to every
issue; she’s entitled to her opinion.
No,
it’s statements like this:
“These are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we
are going to lose our lives but in the sense that it will cost you
something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you
believe in and say those things out loud.”
Or
this:
“Atheistic humanism handed human destiny over to the great god autonomy
and this is quite a different idea of freedom. Freedom then becomes
willfulness.”
As a
matter of fact, these are the least perilous times for people of
faith---particularly the evangelical Protestant faith to which Judge
Brown belongs---in my lifetime. Name the last “atheistic humanist” hired
by the Bush administration to do anything. “People of faith” are in the
saddle and riding the rest of us hard. And I---an agnostic humanist, if
you have to know---have not handed over destiny, human and otherwise, to
any god, let alone the great god autonomy. As a group we secularists are
at least as moral and ethical as our religious brethren and are more fun
at parties.
Believing in the progressive income tax and Social Security is not a
mortal sin. Someone should tell Judge Brown that.
The
scary thing about Judge Brown’s appointment was that she wasn’t even the
worst nominee to be confirmed to the bench that week. There’s Judge
William Pryor, Jr., who thinks Roe v. Wade (the abortion decision) “the
worst abomination of constitutional law in our history” and compares
homosexual relations to bestiality and necrophilia.
God,
if any, help us all.
--
Donald Kaul recently
retired as Washington columnist for the “Des Moines Register.” He has
covered the foolishness in our nation’s capital for 29 years, winning a
number of modestly coveted awards along the way. Email:
donald.kaul2@verizon.net -- A photo of Donald Kaul is available
CLICK HERE
# # # # # # |
