Dr. Forbush Thinks

Yesterday I swapped cars with my wife. Since the AM radio on my car no longer works I found that I could surf the AM dial for the 40-some minutes that it takes to get to work. I listened to Rush for a while, but his obtuse view of the world makes no sense, and it isn’t even worth arguing about any more. So, I flipped over to the local talk radio where the talk show host isn’t quite so radical. On the way home from work I also listened to the AM dial for the ride home.

I was inspired by one talk show host who pointed out that the radical right is being quite dishonest about its description of activist judges. This talk show host, a self proclaimed Libertarian, had no axe to grind with either side of the aisle. He pointed out that the radical right doesn’t really want to get rid of activist judges. The radical right actually wants to appoint activist judges that want to push the radical right’s agenda. This is normal for the party in power, but they are being dishonest about what they want and how they are doing it.

Take Bill Frist’s speech on Sunday. He is basically claiming that the Democrat’s objection to some judges is an attack on the Christian Faith. However, the ten judges that the Democrats oppose actually are activist judges. The ten judges as a group are being objected to because these judges have a history of interpreting the law to support the conservative agenda instead of following the law. This is exactly the point that the radical right makes against judges that imposed busing back in the 1960s and 1970s.

But, the case that the radical right used to crystallize support to “clean up” the judiciary was the Terri Shaivo case. There have been cries from the radical right saying that activist judges put Terri to death. Even in the one day of talk radio I listened to, I heard callers echoing the cry of Activist Judges putting Terri to death.

However, this is far from the truth. Most laws of the country and certainly the laws of Florida say that the husband actually is responsible for his wife. This means that the non-activist position on this issue is to support the husband. This is the law and to support the wife’s parents is certainly the activist position. If conservatives feel that there is a problem here, then there is a problem with the law and not with the judges. If conservatives think that the law should be changed, then they should change to law to what they think it should be. Perhaps they want parents to retain control over their children even after marriage.

I would suggest that this position is contrary to the Religious Conservative’s reading of the Bible. For example: Gen 2:24 “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” After the joining of these two people they become responsible for each other.

So, at every level of the court system the Shindlers asked for the judges to be activists. And, the radical right is using a case of consistent non-activism to claim that the courts are full of activist judges. To make matters worse they are trying to change the Senate debate rules in order to place radical activist judges on the bench. Then Tom DeLay has said that he will cut funding to the activist judges in Florida that allowed Michael Shaivo to let his wife die. And to top off the deceptive practices of the radical right they are publicizing this radical effort by calling it an effort to remove activist judges.

An interesting thing to note is that when governments grab for power they tend to go after the judicial branch. Of course this is because friendly judges will not prosecute crimes of the leaders who appointed them. If the radical right floods the courts with activist radical right judges, then the law will no longer apply to the leaders of the radical right. This issue is actually more important than most people realize, because it goes to the heart of our Democracy. People like Tom DeLay will be able to break the laws with no consequences, while people like Bill Clinton will face hypocritical abuse of power like impeachment for infidelity.