Former House speaker Newt Gingrich appears to be running against the Constitution as much as against President Obama these days. Gingrich has been promising to round up judges who do not agree with him — statements that have even conservative figures like Michael Mukasey, former attorney general during the George W. Bush administration, denouncing him. Mukasey was the attorney general who blocked prosecutions into torture, but finds Gingrich truly scary. I am currently scheduled to be on Hardball tonight to discuss this latest attack on the judiciary.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Gingrich indicated that he would call judges who hand down controversial opinions to appear before Congress to answer for their transgressions and would send federal law enforcement to arrest judges failed to appear.
It is the latest attack on the judicial branch — attacks that led Mukasey to denounce his proposals as “dangerous, ridiculous, totally irresponsible, outrageous, off-the-wall and would reduce the entire judicial system to a spectacle.”
Here is one of the exchanges:
SCHIEFFER: Let me just ask you this and we’ll talk about enforcing it, because one of the things you say is that if you don’t like what a court has done, the congress should subpoena the judge and bring him before congress and hold a congressional hearing. Some people say that’s unconstitutional. But I’ll let that go for a minute.
I just want to ask you from a practical standpoint, how would you enforce that? Would you send the capital police down to arrest him?GINGRICH: If you had to.
SCHIEFFER: You would?
GINGRICH: Or you instruct the Justice Department to send the U.S. Marshal. Let’s take the case of Judge Biery. I think he should be asked to explain a position that radical. How could he say he’s going to jail the superintendent over the word “benediction” and “invocation”? Because before you could — because I would then encourage impeachment, but before you move to impeach him you’d like to know why he said it.
Now clearly since the congress has….SCHIEFFER: What if he didn’t come? What if he said no thank you I’m not coming?
GINGRICH: Well, that is what happens in impeachment cases. In an impeachment case, the House studies whether or not — the House brings them in, the House subpoenas them. As a general rule they show up.
It is the very definition of demagogy to dangle out the image of judges being clapped in irons to satisfy citizens angry over decisions by judges. Article III is designed to guarantee independence from people like Gingrich so that judges can rule in favor of the Constitution and, yes, at times take positions disliked by the majority.
Source: Washington Post
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Gene H:
I am not intimidated by your intelligence in the slightest. If I was I would probably not stay around considering the “intellectual” “drubbing” you keep patting yourself on the back for giving me.
I’ll give it a rest when you give your authoritarian fascist controls a rest. Get your fucking evil government off everybody’s back. Release ALL nonviolent prisons from prison immediately, for starters- including tax, drug war, nonviolent gun charges, and all other so called victimless “crimes.” Stop supporting and paying taxes to a government bombing peaceful people all over the world and imprisoning peaceful people and torturing people. Advocate good- the death of the 4th Nazi Reich of Amerika.
A/C,
Give it a rest. I think I am cool, but I am not a Fascist. But have a nice Holiday anyways.
Bron,
Your intelligence is immense, but much smaller than your ego. Happy Holidays.
You are pure fascists. You just think your fascism is cool, just like Moussolini and Hitler thought their fascism was cool. You think your violations of private property are awesome, just like they did. Thats why the liberals, who are not liberal but stole the label from the laissez-faire classical liberals, and conservatives call each other nazis, for example bush and obama. They are both right. You are all fascists. You don’t like every aspect of the fascist system you support and wish you could make it your own exact brand of fascist dictatorship. In short you are pure evil and think your evil is good. I have far, far more respect for pure communists-socialists. At least they have consistent, if absurd, principles.
“Bron
1, December 23, 2011 at 11:59 pm
Otteray Scribe:
anything I say can be
verifiedfalsified by anyone with a computer and an internet connection.”That’s a much more accurate statement.
Otteray Scribe:
anything I say can be verified by anyone with a computer and an internet connection.
Bron,
I’m sorry my intelligence intimidates you so much.
Nah!
I don’t care that it makes you uncomfortable in the slightest.
lol
Step on my crank?
I’m not the one who has never won an argument here, slick.
You’ve stepped on yours so many times, it’s non-existent. Much like your alleged intelligence. However, I know you have kids, so that’s evidence that you once had a crank. Intelligence? Well, the evidence for yours is more like evidence for a snipe.
Gene H:
Coming from someone who plagiarizes much of what he writes so he can be thought an autodidactic polymath doesnt mean anything at all to me.
You are right Gene!
OS,
HIlarious.
Gene H:
not exactly. When you crib from wikipedia you ought to at least understand what you are copying so you dont step on your crank.
Oh those pesky facts, raff! They just get in the way of propagandists and their puppets.
Gene and raff,
I looked up ipse dixit in the dictionary and found Bron’s picture.
Bron,
Once again, I know it makes it easier for you to make false equivalences, but you should stop using words you don’t know the meaning of and making up definitions. Fascism and socialism are not the same thing no matter how many times you repeat it. Also, the Big Lie only works against people who don’t know better. Most of the posters here are highly educated even when self-educated. We actually know what words mean, unlike you. It should really bother you that your defining attribute in this forum is that almost to a one, people think of you as OS does, namely that you “have been proven in many postings, to be totally full of shit.” And your propensity to make up definitions? It is practically your calling card tactic.
Amen Gene. It is refreshing to read facts and not made up Fox News type talking points.
Actually, the progressive movement has roots that trace directly to the Age of Enlightenment – an age dominated by French and English thought. It rests in the writings of such people as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Pierre Bayle, Isaac Newton, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Baron de Montesquieu, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, François Quesnay, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Edward Gibbon, Denis Diderot, Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon, Cesare Beccaria, Paul-Henri Thiry Holbach, and Johann Gottfried von Herder to name but a few. Please note that the majority of these thinkers are French and English with the notable exceptions of Kant and von Herder. Their collective intellectual force spread across Europe’s urban centers during the late 18th Century in England, Scotland, the Netherlands, Russia, the German states, Italy, Austria, and Spain. From there, the power of their ideas jumped the Atlantic to influence our Founders such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. The bulk of our Founders were profoundly influenced by the ideals of progressive thought as are the cornerstone documents upon which this country is founded: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. Any attempt to rewrite history on this matter is simply disingenuous and incorrect. American progressivism is far more influenced by this group of writers than they are by writers that typify German thought in the 19th Century such as Hegel, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Heidegger or the Dutch Kierkegaard.
ancap:
one thing a progressive doesnt like to hear is that fascism and socialism are nearly identical.
I expect you know Mussolini was a socialist before he called himself a fascist.
Lotta Katz:
Thank you for sharing that article, my point exactly. I wonder what kind of favors Boehner offered to get that money? Maybe just some access? I think the pols are doing the shakedown though. Business is stupid enough to pay up.
By the way I am not comparing the progressives to the Nazis, I am just saying they have the same philosophical background from mid 18th century Germany.
You have a common grandfather and one grandchild is a tyrannical madman and the other is just an autocratic asshole. All I am saying is that they share the same grandfather.
Of course fascists don’t want to talk about their fascism or their fascist history so they have a rule about. You lose if you name their evil! LMAO!
There are many characteristics of fascism and thus many people have defined it slightly differently. Amerika can meet any legitimate definition of fascism, which was called national socialism in Germany (NAZI). Fascism is not a set system like Marxism. Its a mix-mash of fly by the pants authoritarianism caused by disrespect of property rights without full socialization. Inevitably by turning from laissez-faire, the economy becomes inefficient and engages in military spending as a prop for the economy, which started in Amerika in WWI and has escalated ever since. At some point such countries will turn to imperialism thinking they can draw resources from looting abroad, when looting internally isn’t sufficient anymore to either maintain or expand their power and income, as Amerika started even before WWI. Usually enemies will be created, like Jews or Muslems or terrorists or domestic extremists, etc., in order to justify the ever increasing tyranny. There always has to be an enemy or a great goal, which could be building pyramids or going to the moon or building a new highway system or expanding or repairing one or building a new train system or going to mars or making the world safe for democracy or having a war to end war or waging war to bring democracy to the middle east or waging war to end terror (LMAO, thats the most absurd one!) Amerika is PURE fascist. Pure Nazi, though not focused on killing Jews.
[Adolf Hitler on Nazism and socialism:] “Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is Socialism—not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes far deeper . . . .
“[T]he people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them. They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possessions and income and rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime they have entered a new relation; a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.”
Adolf Hitler to Hermann Rauschning
“..the government assumed control of every group of producers and consumers in the country. In accordance with the method of “German socialism,” the facade of a market economy was retained. All prices, wages, and interest rates, however, were “fixed by the central authority. They [were] prices, wages, and interest rates in appearance only; in reality they [were] merely determinations of quantity relations in the government’s orders . . . . This is socialism in the outward guise of capitalism.”
The nation’s businessmen retained the responsibility to produce and suffered the losses attendant on failure. The state determined the purpose and conditions of their production, and reaped the benefits; directly or indirectly, it expropriated all profits. “The time is past,” explained the Nazi Minister of Economics, “when the notion of economic self-seeking and unrestricted use of profits made can be allowed to dominate . . . . The economic system must serve the nation.”
As to Hitler’s pledges to the poorer groups: the Republic’s social insurance budgets were greatly increased, and a variety of welfare funds, programs, agencies, and policies were introduced or expanded, including special provisions for such items as unemployment relief, workmen’s compensation, health insurance, pensions, Winter Help campaigns for the destitute, the Reich Mothers’ Service for indigent mothers and children, and the National Socialist People’s Welfare organization. ~Leonard Peikoff
But the Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument. Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, socialism. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. “Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.
“To be a socialist,” says Goebbels, “is to submit the I to the thou; socialism is sacrificing the individual to the whole.”
By this definition, the Nazis practiced what they preached. They practiced it at home and then abroad. No one can claim that they did not sacrifice enough individuals. ~Leonard Peikoff,
A/C,
Look up the definition of fascism. You aren’t even close.