H.L. Mencken once said, "The objection to Puritans is not that they try
to make us think as they do, but that they try to make us do as they think."

Funny, I was thinking the same thing about Republicans.

Their latest complaint, without a trace of irony, is that the Democrats
are holding up George Bush’s judicial nominations. Tucker Carlson
complained on last Friday’s Crossfire that even if they did do this
very thing to us for eight years under President Clinton, that’s no
excuse for us to do it them now.

What my grandmother would say to this is that with one tuckus,
you can’t dance at two weddings.

But Tucker is right, of course. We should not block Bush’s judicial
nominations simply because the Republicans blocked President Clinton’s.

The reason we should block Bush’s judicial nominations is that has no
mandate to appoint a bunch of right-wing judges in the first place.
Bush lost the popular vote by a half million votes. More than half of
this country told Bush that they don’t want him making any decisions
for us, much less choosing ideological conservatives who will hand down
decision after decision that will set precedents regarding the most
important issues in the country, including abortion and voting rights.

For the same reason that the Republicans would scream bloody murder if
the Democrats nominated Ralph Nader or Jesse Jackson to the Supreme
Court, they should refrain from proposing ultra-conservatives like
Thomas Pickering. As Robert Bork’s writings since his failed Supreme
Court nomination have born out, we cannot afford to appoint idealogical
extremists who will use the judiciary as a work bench to hammer out and
enact their political agendas. The Founding Fathers intended the judiciary
to be a fair and impartial arbiter of laws, not a political activist community.

And Bush is not merely nominating moderate Republicans who believe in
judicial restraint and a conservative interpretation of the Constitution. He is
nominating severe right wingers who, if they had their druthers, would take
their right-wing ideologies, which are opposed by the majority of Americans,
and make them the law of the land. Judges who would, rather than interpret
the Constitution, simply rewrite it to conform to their religious and political
beliefs. The Establishment clause? We don’t need no stinking Establishment
clause. We follow the teachings of Jerry Falwell and Bob Jones.

Anybody who doubts this need only examine the Republicans who held up
President Clinton’s nominees for so long, such as Tom Delay, who recently
said that he believes in a "biblical world view" and that he supported President
Clinton’s impeachment because Clinton "does not have the right world view."

It is reasonable to assume that Delay -- a member of the Council for
National Policy (CNP), a theocratic organization which has as its
stated policy "Christian Reconstructionism," the belief that the U.S.
Constitution draws its authority from the Bible -- would support only
those judicial nominees who share his biblical world view, one in which
the Christian God is the one true God, and all you Jews and Muslims and
atheists can just get knotted, the Constitution doesn’t apply to you.

Using the Delay Constitution, we can conceive of a country in which
only Protestant fundamentalists are allowed to vote, and a religious
heathen only counts as three fifths of a human being.

Another reason to block Bush’s nominations is that, according to David
Brock’s new book "Blinded by the Right," we have two Republican-appointed
Supreme Court Justices, Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice William Rehnquist,
who perjured themselves during their confirmation hearings. Justice Thomas,
Brock says, postitively lied when he claimed not to have an opinion about
abortion, and most likely lied when he stated that he did not make sexual
advances on Anita Hill.

Chief Justice Rehnquist lied, Brock contends, when he claimed that he did
not intimidate black voters when he was an election pollster in the 1960s.
Brock’s allegation against Rehnquist, by the way, is corroborated by John
Dean in his new book "The Rehnquist Choice," and Dean ought to know.
He was the White House official who engineered Rehnquist as President
Nixon’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

If these are the nominees the Republican party intends to continue sending us,
maybe it is a good idea if we don’t confirm any of them for awhile until they
get the idea that lying has consequences. After all, what WILL we tell the children?

Another reason to block Bush’s judicial nominations is that so many of
these Republican-appointed judges seem willing to ignore the law to
further their own conservative agendas.

Chief Justice Rehnquist, for instance, according to Joe Conason and
Gene Lyons in "The Hunting of the President," ignored certain
provisions of the Independent Counsel Act in order to appoint to the
Special Division (the three-judge panel that appoints the Independent
Counsel) Judge David Sentelle, a conservative ideologue (and also a
member of the CNP) who earned his first judicial appointment from
Ronald Reagan after campaigning heavily for Reagan and Jesse Helms.

A former Republican Party chairman in Mecklenburg County, North
Carolina, Sentelle had relatively little judicial experience; yet while the
Independent Counsel Act directed the Chief Justice to give priority in
appointing judges to the Special Division to senior circuit judges and
retired justices, Rehnquist ignored this directive and instead appointed
Sentelle, who he knew would fulfill what was expected of him: to appoint
an Independent Counsel to investigate President Clinton who had what
we might expect Rehnquist also felt was the correct world view.

Sentelle, of course, delivered. He appointed Ken Starr, who also had,
no doubt, what Delay and Sentelle would consider the correct world view.

Maybe those folks who believe in the mythical men in black suits and
mirrored sunglasses are not so crazy after all, only the Men in Black
are not alien-hunters; they’re card-carrying CNP Republicans, and what
they hunt is Democrats.

In the Republican-judges-who-ignore-the-law department, we also have
Florida Circuit Court Judge Sanders Sauls, who denied Al Gore’s motion
for hand counts of the ballots in election 2000, even though Florida law
expressly calls for hand recounts in the case of a contested election.
Gore, not a member of the CNP, no doubt did not have what Judge Sauls
and the Republicans (and Jeb Bush, who is also a CNP member) would
consider the correct world view.

And while we’re on the subject of Judge Sanders Sauls, here’s a
question: What was Ken Hanner, Deputy Editor of the Washington Times,
doing attending a June 2001 tribute to Judge Sauls hosted by Judicial
Watch, the right-wing "legal watchdog" group that, under the
helmsmanship of Larry Klayman (also a member of CNP), filed hundreds of
frivolous lawsuits against President Clinton and his administration?:
http://www.c-spanstore.com/164656.html

Isn’t it reasonable to assume that if a Washington Times editor is a
guest at a tribute for one of the men responsible for helping George
Bush steal the presidency, that editor and that newspaper cannot
possibly be fair and impartial as they claim to and are supposed to be?

That crash you just heard wasn’t your imagination: it was the myth of
the liberal media shattering into a million pieces.

And hey, isn’t that Republican Congressman Howard Coble up there on
that dais with Judge Sauls?

So let me get this straight: Judge Sauls made a fair and impartial
ruling in Al Gore’s election case and was completely uninfluenced by
his connections to the Republican party, and yet a United States
Congressman (who just happens to be a Republican) attended a tribute to
Judge Sauls six months after the election in which Sauls ruled for the
Republican candidate.

If anybody believes that, I’ve got an election to sell you.

But the most important reason to block Bush’s judicial nominees is that
if enough of these ideological conservatives were appointed, they could
conceivably disregard the law, stop the vote counting in a national
election, and maybe even thwart the will of the voters and appoint the
President of the United States.

The Republicans say that we should at least bring these judicial
nominations to a vote. Should we actually count these votes afterward
or just let Antonin Scalia decide the winner? Should Theresa LePore
design a special ballot? Should the judge with the least votes win?

Until the Republicans clean up their acts and learn to respect the
Constitution they propose to uphold, maybe they should warm the bench
for awhile, and not the judicial one, either.