Via Atrios I learn that the extremist radical right-wingers want to make peach jam out of Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy:
Conservative leaders meeting in Washington yesterday for a discussion of "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny" decided that Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, should be impeached, or worse.
Phyllis Schlafly, doyenne of American conservatism, said Kennedy's opinion forbidding capital punishment for juveniles "is a good ground of impeachment." To cheers and applause from those gathered at a downtown Marriott for a conference on "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith," Schlafly said that Kennedy had not met the "good behavior" requirement for office and that "Congress ought to talk about impeachment."
Next, Michael P. Farris, chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association, said Kennedy "should be the poster boy for impeachment" for citing international norms in his opinions. "If our congressmen and senators do not have the courage to impeach and remove from office Justice Kennedy, they ought to be impeached as well."
Not to be outdone, lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, "upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law."
Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his "bottom line" for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. "He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: 'no man, no problem,' " Vieira said.
It's not really peach jam they're planning to cook up. They are planning to impeach everybody who doesn't think that the Constitution is a Biblical document. Thus, it is very odd and fascinating that Vieira quotes Joseph Stalin as support:
The full Stalin quote, for those who don't recognize it, is "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush's judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.
Note that now it isn't the "activist" judges who are the problem, because wingnuts have found passive judges every bit as problematic. The only ok judges are the ones who obey the wingnuts. So now all ornery judges are called "supremacist".
This is both tragic and comic. Comic, because reading about this meeting in one of the most respected newspapers in the world is funny. To think that we are seriously reporting on all this is hilarious. Of course, only if you happen to live elsewhere. The tragic part comes when you live right here and realize that Americans will probably not lift a finger to stop these fanatics.