Courting Disaster

Of all the things that happened on election day, this is by far the most disturbing to me, for it has implications deep and broad for the future of constitutional democracy. It's the real danger of teabagger mentality, their abject failure to understand (or to give a sh*t about) the law:

DES MOINES — An unprecedented vote to remove three Iowa Supreme Court justices who were part of the unanimous decision that legalized same-sex marriage in the state was celebrated by conservatives as a popular rebuke of judicial overreach, even as it alarmed proponents of an independent judiciary.

The outcome of the election was heralded both as a statewide repudiation of same-sex marriage and as a national demonstration that conservatives who have long complained about “legislators in robes” are able to effectively target and remove judges who issue unpopular decisions.

Leaders of the recall campaign said the results should be a warning to judges elsewhere. “I think it will send a message across the country that the power resides with the people,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor who led the campaign. “It’s we the people, not we the courts.”

It literally gives me a chill, makes me feel ill. How far from understanding our Constitution is such a statement. How threatening to the deepest of our roots in law. It's me, the son of a supreme court judge speaking here, the son of a chief judge of a court of appeals; but you don't have to be born into a family of law to have a third-grade understanding of how it works.

Gay marriage is not the issue (although it is.) The point is that we have laws, the responibility of seeing to the following of which falls to the courts. If you accept the idea of America, then you must accept the idea that when a state passes a law that's contrary to its own or to the nation's constitution, then judges must strike it down. It is the single most important barrier between ourselves and mob rule. Mob rule should frighten us all. Even the mobs.

There are ways to legalize the discrimination against an entire class of fellow humans, and I don't doubt that teabaggers and everyone else who reveres the RWS™ and believes Fox "news" would love to invoke them. If we want to be a country that dehumanizes gays and denies them basic civil rights; if we want to become a Christian nation and deploy our equivalent version of Sharia law upon the land (which I'm also certain the right wingers would love to do), we can do it. All it requires is the established process of constitutional amendment. (Which, by design, isn't as easy as brewing tea.) You want it, go for it. And if you succeed, judges will be expected to defend it.

That obscene statement at the end of the quoted paragraphs above is as unAmerican as it gets. You want to see actual, not made-up, fascism? That's it. You want to see how misguided and uninformed teabaggers are? Re-read that sentence, over and over. It's as far from our democracy as any idea can be. If you like the idea of judges ignoring the law and allowing "the people" to run unshod and smelly-footed over it; if you like the idea of judges doing the bidding of the people in charge no matter what laws say, then you'd like living in Iran.

But it's a hard concept. The idea that just because a majority of people choose to do something it isn't automatically legal is one that sits poorly with the right wing. Strangely, since it's they that claim to have a monopoly on patriotic love. Tri-corners don't seem to transmit wisdom to the head on which they sit. Nowadays.

It's legal in many states to vote judges out of office; one instance might be happening in my state (although here, it's about his off-court behavior.) But in the case of Iowa, I hope that whoever they elect in their place have the guts and wisdom to follow the law, the willingness to be unelected for doing so. (It was a unanimous decision, and two of the ousted judges were appointed by a conservative Republican governor.) Of all people to understand that, you'd think it'd be conservatives. But that's not who's calling the shots any more. It's the religiously blind, the brainwashed, the Foxobeckified, the prejudiced, the lazy thinkers who don't do hard, who stamp their feet and demand their candy. For free.

That they're putting the inmates back in charge of the asylum known as Congress is old news, big deal. Happens all the time. Congress has always been full of idiots. Hard to tell them apart, sometimes.

It's why we have judges.