by Jeremy Leaming
Newt Gingrich’s outlandish commentary on so-called radical judges is garnering, rightfully so, plenty of attention, but as American University Law Professor Jamie Raskin writes in this piece for The Huffington Post, there are other Republican presidential candidates, whose positions on the judiciary are just as worrisome.
Raskin, also a Maryland State senator, noted that Gingrich’s “outbursts against judicial independence” have raised the hackles of a number of prominent conservatives. And one can see why he says. Du
ring the last GOP debate, Gingrich’s comments about the judicial branch, Raskin says, “were divorced from reality and indeed comical for a self-proclaimed ‘historian.’ He called the courts ‘grotesquely dictatorial, far too powerful, and … arrogant in their misreading of the American people.’”
In particular Gingrich claimed he was seriously peeved over the federal appeals court opinion that found constitutionally suspect the practice of reciting in public schools the Pledge of Allegiance, which was made religious during the Eisenhower administration with the assertion of the words “under God.” That decision, as Raskin notes, was later reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Nonetheless, Gingrich bandied about that federal appeals court opinion, along with a few others, to blast the federal courts and claim that if he were president he’d take action to reign judges in. (On a CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Gingrich said there is “no reason the American people need to tolerate a judge that is out of touch with American culture,” and that if he were president he’d order federal Marshalls to arrest such judges.)
But Raskin warns that voters who care about an independent judiciary should not be lulled into believing that Mitt Romney is any better on the matter.
Raskin points out that “Romney’s new constitutional advisor is none other than former Judge Robert Bork, an astounding selection to head up the Governor’s legal and constitutional affairs advisory team. Bork is a fiercely pro-corporate, anti-voting rights, anti-choice, anti-feminist, pro-censorship, anti-gay, anti-free speech, anti-separation of church and state, and evolution-denying ideologue who has described the 9th Amendment to the Constitution defending the rights of the people as ‘an inkblot’ and called for allowing Supreme Court constitutional decisions to be overturned by majority vote in Congress as well as a constitutional amendment to deny gay people the right to marry.”
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