DeLay-ing the Inevitable
Happy Friday.
After the elections of 2000 and 2004 there was much talk about secession; the blue coastal states breaking away from the red fly-over states and taking their tax base with them. I've got a better idea, just secede from Texas. Perhaps that long forgotten war over the territory was better lost...
Exhibit A: The ironic absurdity behind the "selection" of a judge to preside over Rep. Tom DeLay's campaign finance trial. In Texas, judges are elected requiring them to choose a political party and play the campaign game. So, DeLay complained when he got a democrat for a judge. A republican judge was then asked to make a new appointment, but he was removed at the request of the prosecutor, Ronnie Earl. Then a democrat was appointed, but the appointer, Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, was asked to withdraw from the process after it was revealed that:
Incest is best in Texas.
Could it happen anywhere else? A trial charging Delay with illegally funneling corporate campaign contributions to Republican candidates during the 2002 legislative races can't get off the ground because all of the republican judges are somehow connected to the defendant.
Of course, while Texas state judges are elected, other states have their judges appointed by elected politicians; as does the federal system. Based on the "logic" of the DeLay case, any judge, anywhere, has some partisan affiliation and can't be trusted to be neutral.
Extreme partisanship long has infected the legislature and over the past fifty years the executive as well. But, now, the last hope for neutrality and integrity, the judiciary, too has fallen prey. Bush v. Gore should have been a clarion call for reform. Instead, the ever persistent status quo has allowed the infection to spread, with no cure in sight. Students of history know what's inevitable when a government becomes so corrupted the corruption becomes acceptable...anyone watching Rome?
After the elections of 2000 and 2004 there was much talk about secession; the blue coastal states breaking away from the red fly-over states and taking their tax base with them. I've got a better idea, just secede from Texas. Perhaps that long forgotten war over the territory was better lost...
Exhibit A: The ironic absurdity behind the "selection" of a judge to preside over Rep. Tom DeLay's campaign finance trial. In Texas, judges are elected requiring them to choose a political party and play the campaign game. So, DeLay complained when he got a democrat for a judge. A republican judge was then asked to make a new appointment, but he was removed at the request of the prosecutor, Ronnie Earl. Then a democrat was appointed, but the appointer, Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson, was asked to withdraw from the process after it was revealed that:
- His 2002 campaign treasurer, Bill Ceverha, was treasurer of DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee;
- The PAC is a co-defendant in DeLay's case;
- Ceverha was a defendant this spring in a civil trial brought by Democrats who lost state legislative races to Republicans in 2002;
- Jefferson was elected to his seat with the help of a $25,000 donation from the Republican National State Elections Committee, a group at the heart of the money laundering charge against DeLay; and
- He also received $2,000 from a DeLay-run PAC whose executive director is a co-defendant.
Incest is best in Texas.
Could it happen anywhere else? A trial charging Delay with illegally funneling corporate campaign contributions to Republican candidates during the 2002 legislative races can't get off the ground because all of the republican judges are somehow connected to the defendant.
Of course, while Texas state judges are elected, other states have their judges appointed by elected politicians; as does the federal system. Based on the "logic" of the DeLay case, any judge, anywhere, has some partisan affiliation and can't be trusted to be neutral.
Extreme partisanship long has infected the legislature and over the past fifty years the executive as well. But, now, the last hope for neutrality and integrity, the judiciary, too has fallen prey. Bush v. Gore should have been a clarion call for reform. Instead, the ever persistent status quo has allowed the infection to spread, with no cure in sight. Students of history know what's inevitable when a government becomes so corrupted the corruption becomes acceptable...anyone watching Rome?
posted by Happy Friday | 7:28 AM
4 Comments:
Other than direct election or appointment by elected officials, not sure how else we get judges. A fight to the death in the Coliseum? Let Paula Abdul decide? Rock-paper-scissors?
The solution, as always, will come if and when Americans stop embracing a smothering two-party system that has no Constitutional Foundation. George Washington, himself, explicitly warned against the dangers of factionalism in his farewell address. The entire document is worth reading (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Washington%27s_Farewell_Address), but this passage seems especially relevant:
"All obstructions to the execution of the Laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive of this fundamental principle, and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation, the will of a party, often a small but artful and enterprising minority of the community; and, according to the alternate triumphs of different parties, to make the public administration the mirror of the ill-concerted and incongruous projects of faction, rather than the organ of consistent and wholesome plans digested by common counsels, and modified by mutual interests.
However combinations or associations of the above description may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people, and to usurp for themselves the reins of government; destroying afterwards the very engines, which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
Until the public is willing to ignore the excoriations of the NY Times and the rest of the mainstream press, it will not improve. With their warnings not to "waste one's vote," but instead to do the expedient thing and support one of the two "legitimate" canditates, the press and its partner, the government, are leading us down the path that finds Tom DeLay and his coterie of hired judges in the garden at its end.
"A trial charging Delay with illegally funneling corporate campaign contributions to Republican candidates during the 2002 legislative races can't get off the ground because all of the republican judges are somehow connected to the defendant."
AND, it cannot get off the ground because, "A republican judge. . . was removed at the request of the prosecutor, Ronnie Earl."
This one goes both ways.
Your reversion to partisanship evidences Happy Friday's point. Get above it, or at last beyond it, as Rogers suggests...
Just keeping HF honest.
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