Following on this post from yesterday on misguided efforts to restrict the independence of judicial branch of government, this Washington Post article profiles Rick Scarborough, the Pearland, Texas Baptist minister turned political operative. Mr. Scarborough is a leader in the movement within the Republican Party to persuade Senate Republicans to change the rules so that Democrats cannot use filibuster to block President Bush’s federal judicial nominees. In 2002, Jerry Falwell publicly touted Mr. Scarborough as one of the new leaders of the religious right in America.
Meanwhile, George Washington University Law Professor Orin Kerr over at the Volokh Conspiracy takes a good-natured jab at those such as Mr. Scarborough who disingenuously claim that the fight over the judiciary is based on Constitutional principles and not good ol’ fashioned American politics. Professor Kerr observes the following about a prominent Supreme Court Justice:

If you think about it, [this Justice] is directly or indirectly responsible for many of the problems with the modern judiciary. Not only did [this Justice] personally fail to intervene in the Schiavo case, ignoring the will of Congress, but he has repeatedly urged judges to simply ignore Congressional intent. He refuses to cite legislative history, woodenly following the “text” rather than deferring to clear statements of what Congressional leaders intended to do. This kind of judicial hubris is simply unacceptable.
His activist opinions have invented new constitutional rights for marijuana growers, given thousands of convicted criminals a “get out of jail free” card, and tried to limit the President’s ability to fight the war on terror. In addition, [this Justice] has relied heavily on foreign legal sources to interpret allegedly ambiguous provisions of the Bill of Rights (see part II.A). Indeed, [this Justice’s] contempt for our system of Government is so great that he admits he wants to see the Constitution “dead.“

Who is the Justice taking such outrageous positions? That’s right, Mr. Scarborough’s favorite, Justice Antonin Scalia.
Also, University of Texas Law Professor Brian Leiter points to this statement approved by the deans of the United States’ top law schools (including Dean William Powers of the UT Law School and Dean Nancy Rapoport of the University of Houston Law Center), which provides the following common sense advice:

Recent threats of retaliation against federal judges by members of Congress and others harm the rule of law and the important constitutional principle of separation of powers. We strongly oppose these threats of retaliation. Regardless of whether we agree or disagree with their opininons, we express our full support for judges who properly discharge their constitutional responsibilities by deciding the cases before them as they believe the law requires.
We recognize that Americans wil often disagree, as do we, with particular judicial opinions. But the legislative and executive branches have constitutional means available to them to seek to alter the law as declared by the judiciary. An effort to use those means is part of our tradition of separation of powers and is entirely proper. But it is irresponsible and harmful to our constitutional system and to the value of a judiciary that is independent, in fact and appearance, when prominent individuals and members of Congress state or imply that judges may be impeached or otherwise punished because of their rulings. We urge them to stop.

Check out the following executive summary of this Cato Institute paper entitled The Grand Old Spending Party: How Republicans Became Big Spenders:

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. His 2006 budget doesn?t cut enough spending to change his place in history, either.
Total government spending grew by 33 percent during Bush?s first term. The federal budget as a share of the economy grew from 18.5 percent of GDP on Clinton?s last day in office to 20.3 percent by the end of Bush?s first term.
The Republican Congress has enthusiastically assisted the budget bloat. Inflation-adjusted spending on the combined budgets of the 101 largest programs they vowed to eliminate in 1995 has grown by 27 percent.
The GOP was once effective at controlling non-defense spending. The final non-defense budgets under Clinton were a combined $57 billion smaller than what he proposed from 1996 to 2001. Under Bush, Congress passed budgets that spent a total of $91 billion more than the president requested for domestic programs. Bush signed every one of those bills during his first term. Even if Congress passes Bush?s new budget exactly as proposed, not a single cabinet-level agency will be smaller than when Bush assumed office.
Republicans could reform the budget rules that stack the deck in favor of more spending. Unfortunately, senior House Republicans are fighting the changes. The GOP establishment in Washington today has become a defender of big government.

This Slate op-ed provides historical perspective to the findings of the Cato Institute study. Hat tip to Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution for the links.

Ron Chernow — the author of The House of Morgan (1990), The Warburgs (1994), Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (1998), and last year’s marvelous Alexander Hamilton (2004) — writes this interesting NY Times op-ed in which he provides insightful historical perspective on the current political battle that is brewing over the misguided proposals of certain Republican Party politicians to cut off federal financing for the judiciary and even abolish some lower-level federal courts.
After explaining how President Thomas Jefferson and the Republicans attempted to undermine the independence of the American judiciary during the early 1800’s after former President John Adams and the Federalist Party had stacked the federal judiciary immediately before Adams had left office, Mr. Chernow observes wisely:

So, before they starve the lower courts of funds, Republicans in Congress and the conservative evangelicals who support them would be wise to ponder these events of the early 1800’s. For all the talk today of tyrannical judges, the judiciary still relies on Congress for its financing and on the executive branch to enforce its decisions. It could easily, once again, end up at the mercy of the other two branches, upsetting the delicate balance the framers intended.

Or, stated another way, if a leader of the stature of Thomas Jefferson almost compromised the independence of the judiciary, just think what damage Tom DeLay could do.

British historian Paul Johnson (author of “Modern Times,” “History of the Jews,” “History of Christianity,” “A History of the American People,” and his more recent “Art, A New History,” among others) is one of my favorites. In Modern Times, one of his dominant themes is the development in the 20th century of huge governments and their exponential capacity to do evil, particularly to human life.
In this insightful Opinion Journal op-ed on Pope John Paul II, Mr. Johnson notes that the world has lost one of its staunchest supporters of the sanctity of human life:

This great pontiff was essentially a defender, promoter, protector and enhancer of life: life in all its forms, as God created them, but especially human life.
He sought to limit, almost to vanishing point, the occasions on which the state, let alone individuals, might legitimately extinguish or frustrate life. He had spent his manhood largely under the tyranny of the two vilest anti-life systems the world had ever seen: Nazism and Communism, together responsible for the unnatural deaths of over 120 million people in Europe and Asia. He had seen at close quarters the appalling consequences which inexorably follow when authority is directed by philosophy contemptuous of life.

John Paul was, perhaps, most vehement in his condemnation of abortion, especially when practiced under the sanction of law and on a huge scientific scale, in the clinics specially created to smother the spark of life before birth, which he compared to the death camps erected by Nazi and Soviet mass murderers. It was a sharp sword in his heart which filled him with righteous indignation that, after the world had been scourged for more than 50 years by the mass killings of totalitarianism, anti-life politicians, above all in the democracies, should have set up a holocaust of the unborn which has already–as he often asserted with awe and anger–ended the existence of more tiny human creatures than all the efforts of Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined.
But it should not be thought that John Paul’s defense of life was conducted on principles seen as conservative. He was an absolute and implacable opponent of capital punishment, an issue on which he parted sorrowfully from many of his warmest admirers. He was most reluctant to admit the admissibility of war in almost any circumstances. He was wary of giving any kind of approval to President Bush’s active war on terror, and plainly opposed the invasion of Iraq. It was his view that a righteous ruler, however tempted by the urge to end wicked regimes, should not set in motion events which would soon move out of control and perhaps cause evils far worse than those it was designed to end.
Not that the pope condoned terrorism in any form. He was never among those clergy in the West who mitigated their disapproval by pointing to legitimate grievances.
Indeed it would be hard to imagine a greater contrast between Pope John Paul, who spent his entire existence searching perpetually to prolong and preserve life, and that evil caricature of a spiritual leader Osama bin Laden, who from the moment he awakes, throughout the day, until he falls into a troubled sleep, directs his agents to end as many lives as possible, including their own (but never his). In their cataclysmic duality, these two men came as close as ever human beings do to embodying the principles of Good and Evil.

Read the entire piece.