The Nashua Advocate Calls for Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) to Resign Immediately From the U.S. Senate, Following Remarks Excusing Terrorism Against Judges

By ADVOCATE STAFF

There aren't many rules of behavior in the United States Senate.

For the most part, the body is a self-policing one, and one of its fundamental traits, throughout its august history, has been decorum.

However, one inviolable rule--or at least it says here--is that a sitting United States Senator must not excuse, condone, or seek to mitigate acts of terrorism committed against Americans on American soil.

A sitting United States Senator must not excuse, condone, or seek to mitigate the assassination of members of the federal government of the United States.

And a sitting United States Senator must do nothing whatsoever to promote, encourage, or justify continued acts of terrorism upon, or the attempted assassinations of, members of the federal government of the United States.

A Republican Senator from the State of Texas has just done all three of these things--and thus, in the view of this news outlet, has forfeited his job in the United States Senate.

Not 72 hours ago, The Nashua Advocate wrote at length on the contempt of the modern Republican Party for one of the three co-equal branches of the United States federal government: specifically, the judicial branch.

Our analysis was spurred, in large part, by this thinly-veiled incitement to violence on the part of the United States House Minority Leader, Representative Tom DeLay (R-TX)--who was speaking, in the quote which follows, on the death of a brain-dead Florida woman, Terri Schiavo: "This loss happened because our legal system did not protect the people who need protection most, and that will change...[t]he time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior."

DeLay also charged that the judicial branch of the federal government is "arrogant, out-of-control, [and] unaccountable."

At the time of DeLay's remark, more than fifty protestors had been arrested for criminal acts outside the hospice where Terri Schiavo was being cared for, and at least one plot to murder judges in the Terri Schiavo case had already been uncovered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. DeLay's threat was considered so outrageous that a United States Senator from New Jersey actually leveled the charge against him, by way of formal written notice, that he may have committed a federal crime by implicitly condoning the use of violence against federal judges.

Now Cornyn has fleshed out DeLay's attempted intimidation of the judiciary.

In a statement on the floor of the United States Senate, Cornyn--incredibly, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee--has blamed the judicial branch of the United States government, specifically the United States Supreme Court, for the recent spate of terroristic acts on American soil which left a judge dead in Georgia and a judge's family dead in Illinois; Cornyn also intimated that the judicial branch of the federal government has become "dangerous."

[The statement was made as part of the Republicans' ongoing effort to break with 216 years of parliamentary tradition in the United States Senate and abolish the "filibuster"--primarily as a means to push through Congress radical Rightist judges; presumably, the sort of judges who, in Cornyn's home State of Texas, found no ineffective assistance of counsel under the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution in the case of a defense attorney sleeping through a capital murder trial].

Here is the relevant portion of Cornyn's dangerous, poisonous, and virulently inciteful remarks:

[I]t causes a lot of people, including me, great distress to see judges use the authority that they have been given to make raw political or ideological decisions. And no one, including those judges, including the judges on the United States Supreme Court, should be surprised if one of us stands up and objects.

And, Mr. President, I'm going to make clear that I object to some of the decision-making process that is occurring at the United States Supreme Court today and now. I believe that insofar as the Supreme Court has taken on this role as a policy-maker rather than an enforcer of political decisions made by elected representatives of the people, it has led to the increasing divisiveness and bitterness of our confirmation fights. That is a very current problem that this body faces today. It has generated a lack of respect for judges generally. I mean, why should people respect a judge for making a policy decision borne out of an ideological conviction any more than they would respect or deny themselves the opportunity to disagree if that decision were made by an elected representative?

Of course the difference is that they can throw the rascal out--and we are sometimes perceived as the rascal--if they don't like the decisions that we make. But they can't vote against a judge because judges aren't elected. They serve for a lifetime on the federal bench. And, indeed, I believe this increasing politicalization of the judicial decision-making process at the highest levels of our judiciary have bred a lack of respect for some of the people that wear the robe. And that is a national tragedy.

And finally, 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, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news. And 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 and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence. Certainly without any justification but a concern that I have that I wanted to share.

You know, it's ironic, if you look back, as we all have, being students of history in this body, all of us have been elected to other bodies and other offices and we're all familiar with the founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution itself, we're familiar with the federalist papers that were written in an effort to get the Constitution ratified in New York state. Well, Alexander Hamilton, apropos of what I want to talk about here, authored a series of essays in the Federalist Papers that opined that the judicial branch would be what he called the, quote, "least dangerous branch of government." The "least dangerous branch." He pointed out that the judiciary lacked the power of the executive branch, the White House, for example, and the federal government and the political passions of the legislature. In other words, the Congress. Its sole purpose--that is, the federal judiciary's sole purpose was to objectively interpret and apply the laws of the land...

Had Cornyn actually read the U.S. Constitution anytime recently, his decrying of lifetime appointments for federal judges would have rung somewhat hollow, given that these appointments are explicitly prescribed by the Constitution itself: "The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour..." [U.S. Const., Art. III, sect. 1].

For a sitting Senator to use locked-and-loaded phrases like "it has led," "it has generated," "it has bred," "some connection," and "cause-and-effect" to characterize the relationship between the constitutionally-guaranteed maxim of judicial independence and the assassination of federal judges is an abhorrence, an abomination, and an outrage of unprecedented proportion--even in the well-documented, sorry history of conservatives' open contempt for judicial independence and the rule of law (e.g., non-compliance with anti-segregation edicts in southern states; violence against abortion clinics; school-sponsored prayer in violation of standing court orders; and so on).

Cornyn's comment is one of the few you will ever hear from a national politician which sounds significantly worse in context--a context which includes not only a dead judge in Georgia and a judges' family massacred execution-style in Illinois, but also a thinly-veiled and possibly criminal threat against the federal bench from a member of Congress and a recently-uncovered murder plot in the Terri Schiavo case directed against (no surprise, given the Cornyn-backed, G.O.P. incitement on this point) the state and federal judges on the case.

If a man refuses to uphold the text of the United States Constitution, and indeed allows for the presence of violence against one co-equal branch of government as a sort of explicable response to constitutionally-guaranteed judicial independence, that man is no Senator.

Call him a plumber, a lawyer, a street-sweeper, a doctor, or a physicist.

But not a Senator.

That title comes with few rules--but opposing terrorism against the federal government of the United States just happens to be one of them.