Thursday, December 22, 2011

Newt and the Courts by Gene Veith


What do you think of Newt Gingrich’s expressed plan, if he is elected president, to ignore court rulings that he disagrees with, to legislate judicial districts out of existence, to arrest judges in order to haul them before legislators to explain their rulings, to over-rule the Supreme Court with the agreement of the other two branches of government, and to attach riders to some laws that make them unreviewable by the courts?

What I think is that this would be a dangerous tampering with the constitutional division of powers. In place of the rule of law (the conservative ideal), our government would be reduced to an unstable and arbitrary power struggle. Yes, the judicial branch gets out of hand sometimes, but this is no solution. Conservatives might like the idea of squelching liberal judges, but liberals can play the same game against conservative judges. And for whatever legal precedents Gingrich thinks he has for all of this, throwing our whole system of government up in the air to try something else is NOT conservative and certainly NOT wise.

I’m open to persuasion, but this is turning me against Newt.

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