To me it is very clear what kind of president Newt Gingrich would be, simply by his recent remarks concerning judges. Newt thinks judges should be arrested by federal marshals and brought before Congress to be questioned, if the president or members of Congress doesn’t like their deliberations.
What this clearly shows is that the former House Speaker really doesn’t understand our system of government. If what he said should become law, it would make our system of government a completely politically controlled entity. It also reveals what kind of president Newt would be if he were able to obtain the White House. I think we could fairly call him King Newt because that’s what he seems to be suggesting. If King Newt didn’t like a certain judge who he deemed too liberal, then he could simply order federal marshals to arrest that judge.
This would send a chilling effect over our judicial system. Judges would fear disapproval from our politicians and would feel the need to deliberate from the bench accordingly of whoever was president and what party they belonged to, and the same with whichever party control Congress.
Recently, I’ve been very disappointed in our U.S. Supreme Court, as it seems to be controlled by ideologues from the right with an agenda to change laws that have been important to our political system for a very long time. But I also know that if those justices go too far, that we have a remedy and that is impeachment, which takes a majority in the House of Representatives and two-thirds of a majority in the Senate.
There have been times in history that our judicial system has protected the rights of those without a voice and when Congress was overrun by political forces that cared less about minorities and those who have little political influence. Our judicial branch has stood against the winds of injustice many times over America’s history. The Civil Rights era is a good example, such as in Brown vs. The Board of Education in 1954. It was thanks to the United Supreme Court that minority black children’s right to an equal education that allowed them to attend schools that were before, only for white students. Before that historical ruling by the highest court in the land, black children were forced to attend black-only schools that were underfunded and inadequate to provide a decent education to the students that attended them. The law of the land was “separate but equal” but those schools were anything but equal.
We were fortunate that politics didn’t rule the day at that time and our Congress didn’t have the power to have those judges arrested and brought before Congress. If so, it might have been very likely that those justices would have ruled another way, allowing politics to keep them in line with whatever the controlling party in Congress would have them to rule.
There are many in our society that have very little power in Washington and can’t afford expensive lobbyist to lobby our Congress, our president and statehouses throughout this country. There are powerful corporations that would destroy our ecosystem with their pollutions and they would like to deregulate pollution control laws simply because they cost money to implement and it cuts into their profit lines. It is thanks in no small part to the only nonpolitical branch of our government that isn’t influenced by lobbyist who has helped protect those regulations, and that is our judicial branch.
Our court system has protected worker’s rights to a safe work environment and protected us against discrimination because of the color of our skin, our religious beliefs, our sexual orientation, against discrimination against age and sex and has protected the rights of so many different people from all different walks of life. They’ve even protected the rights of our children and the rights of animals. Many times those rights were overlooked by our other branches of government because it wasn’t politically expedient at the time. We owe so much to the independence of our federal judges.
Even many conservatives and highly respected members of Newt Gingrich’s own party have spoken out against his remarks concerning judges, as even they can see the implications that it would bring and the risk to the independence of our judicial system.
A judge is considered to be an activist anytime their ruling is disagreed upon by one party or the other. Surely some judges may be activist but the remedy is always clear and that is their ruling can be appealed to a higher court or in the worse scenario, a judge can be impeached. The very idea of arresting a judge because the current president or the current Congress; who are all political appointees and controlled by their perspective party affiliations, doesn’t like their ruling; is outrageous
This makes it clear to sensible people from both parties that Mr. Gingrich does not belong as president of our nation. But then we need not fear; our political voting system will assure us that he’ll never be president, because intelligent voters will never give him a chance.