This is all from Obsidian Wings. Sebastian tackles Senator Cornyn in another courageous Police Your Own post.
Mostly though, I wanted to link to Katherine R’s comment. There’s no way to hop straight to her comment, so I’m quoting it here.
Katerine R wrote:
On Cornyn’s remark: it is certainly possible to analyze the causes of a terrible thing without attempting, consciously or unconsciously, to excuse or justify it. And there is not a bright line between explanation and excuse. What category I put it in depends on:
1) whether the alleged explanation is true, or at least whether a reasonable person could believe it is true.
2) the context in which it is made.
To see the importance of context in determining whether a denunciation of violence is sincere or not, note this extreme example, taken from a comment in a Matt Yglesias thread a long time ago:
The quite genuinely fascist Northern Irish nut Ian Paisley (who received a doctorate from- can you guess- Bob Jones University) had a splendid way of going about this, as described by Martin Bell of the BBC. Speaking at a crowd of massively inflamed Ulster Protestants, he would say ‘The BBC, as you all know, have been supporting the IRA in their murder campaign and spreading lies about our people. THERE (pointing) is one of their worst liars, the journalist Martin Bell and his film crew. Of course, as a clergyman, I strongly deprecate all forms of violence. But, alas, I realise I am totally unable to restrain a mighty crowd such as yourselves.’
The context of Cornyn’s remarks is obviously nowhere as close to as damning as the context of Paisley’s remarks. Not in the same league at all. But if you want to understand the context from a Democrat’s point of view, here it is (cross-posted):
there is an effort By: KatherineR
To de-legitimize the independent judiciary itself, and the rule of law.
I am sure the GOP’s dislike of the judiciary began as genuine and justified anger about either the lousy constitutional reasoning behind, or the human costs of, the decisions of the Warren Court. There are some decisions conservatives had every reason to be angry about on both levels, like Roe v. Wade.There are also some decisions, like Brown v. Bd. of Ed., which were not well argued at all but whose results were entirely correct, legally and morally. Those also sparked a lot of hostility to the judiciary, and for whatever reason most of the people and parts of the country that were angriest about that are now in the Republican party. I think an overwhelming number of them now support the outcome of Brown on both a moral and legal level, but I think the hostility and distrust towards the judiciary remains.
There are also plenty of decisions whose legal arguments are excellent, and where the law pretty clearly required the judges to act as they did, but the G.O.P. rejects because it disagrees with the outcome.
The anger about Roe is, as I said, quite justified in my opinion. If I were on the Supreme Court I would vote to overturn it. If I were in the Senate I would not make it a litmus test in voting for nominees–though unfortunately any nominee who wanted to overturn Roe would almost certainly also cross lines that I do consider litmus tests.
But it has gotten loose from its moorings and become a generalized hatred and distrust of the judiciary that has little to do with the legal reasoning of decisions, or their evaluation of the facts. It has gotten to a point where the aim seems to be to delegitimize the judiciary in general.
I don’t think Tom DeLay or John Cornyn has any intention of murdering judges or inciting others to do so. But they are playing a dangerous game here, and I think they are playing it because they want to either intimidate judges into doing what they want, or, failing this, to openly defy inconvenient rulings of the courts in an act of alleged civil disobedience. A “Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let us see him enforce it” moment, or a George Wallace stand in the school house door.
If that it is not their intent, it may still be their effect. This is a dangerous game to be playing.
At a time when:
–the Republicans control the House, the Senate and the White House
–they are seeking to end the filibuster in the Senate
–they have made major changes in the House rules to marginalize not only Democrats but moderate Republicans
–the House has been gerrymandered enough to protect incumbents in general and Republican control in particular & is being gerrymandered more now, so that even if a majority of the public opposes their policies it is fairly implausible that the Democrats will retake the House in 2006.
–the large cities that are the heart of the Democrats’ constituency are in the states that are most underrepresented in the Senate; the rural areas that are the heart of the Republicans’ constituency are in the states that are most overrepresented in the Senate, so it is fairly implausible that the Democrats will retake the Senate in 2006 even if that is what the voters want. (As I’ve noted before, the Democratic Senators got more votes in the last election than the Republican Senators and still lost five seats. That might have been fluke-y; you don’t usually have such lopsided races in California AND New York AND Illinois. But if we can get more votes and lose five seats, we can’t count on gaining six seats in unless we get a lot, a lot more votes, and given the increasing polarization of the country I think this is unrealistic.)
–the Democratic caucus has been badly led for so long that their party discipline is atrocious, and while the Senate leadership shows signs of getting its act together the habit has proved very very hard to break.
–the Bush administration has successfully convinced a large % of the public that their press releases, Fox News, and talk radio are more trustworthy sources of fact than the Washington Post or the New York Times or PBS or even (this is true; there are surveys to prove it) C-Span.
–The mainstream media does a really really really lousy job of informing the public.
–There is an effort to pass laws that attempt to force state-run universities to conform to party orthodoxy, and to de-legitimize private universities, like judges and the press, as “liberal elites out of touch with mainstream America” in the eyes of the public.
–Huge % of scientists working for the Agencies and other civil service employees have said that they are afraid of losing their jobs if they make factual determinations that the administration does not like, and have changed not only their actions but their factual findings accordingly.
–It is routine for Republicans to either directly say or insinuate that Democrats are guilty of or close to guilty of treason, murder, hate America, etc.
–There are serious attempts to limit the rights of unpopular minorities (i.e. gay people, Muslims).
–The administration has taken the position that it can indefinitely detain American citizens on American soil without charge or trial.
–The administration has argued that torture of prisoners is legal under some circumstances.
–Members of the administration have argued that not only is it legal for the President to allow torture, but it unconstitutional for Congress to order him not to torture, and he would be justified in disobeying such a law.
–There have been numerous, credible, accusations of torture. There are many documents showing that the administration turned a blind eye to torture, or authorized policies that would forseeably and inevitably lead to torture. There has not been and will not be an independent investigation of this.
–The only effective check on the President’s claims of unlimited executive power have been the federal courts–starting, but not ending, with the Supreme Court’s decisions in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Rasul v. Bush.
–Again, we are at war. As the President’s advisors themselves have recognized, this is a struggle of ideologies and for hearts and minds rather than of conventional military force. If we go off the rails in our treatment of Muslims, I think it could have disastrous effects on the outcome of this war.
–We have fortunately gone longer than I thought without a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, but the possibility remains. A nuclear attack or biological attack is unlikely, but not impossible and not implausible. A chemical or radiological attack are even more plausible. All of these sorts of attacks would probably lead to the public rallying around the President & accepting far greater restrictions on civil liberties. This will be true even if the President’s policies actually did more to contribute to the attack than to stop it–it will not be possible to prove that e.g. the President’s neglect of A.Q. Khan’s black market made this possible, or that the rise of Zarqawi’s network because of the Iraq war was a but-for cause of this attack, or that Abu Ghraib helped make it more likely. Even if the arguments are true, we will not know they are true, and people who make these arguments will be accused of blaming Bush and not the terrorists, and the public will probably buy this whether it’s true or not.I don’t go in for stupid Nazi analogies. I have pointed out plenty of times that not only have Bush’s abuses of power not compared to Hitler’s, but that as far as U.S. citizens go they do not compare to FDR or Woodrow Wilson’s. But just because things have turned out all right in the past (assuming you accept the internment camps as turning out all right, which I don’t) does not mean that they will turn out all right in the future–our country has been extraordinary lucky, and one day that luck may run out.
One of the best means I have had of preventing liberals, myself included, from getting stupid and hysterical and paranoid has been to point out: the courts have been truly courageous in defending the Constitution and the laws in general. And while they have attempted to evade the courts’ decisions in every way imaginable, and make ridiculous legal arguments in justification of blatantly illegal acts until they get a final court order to stop–when the courts have given a clear order to stop, the administration has stopped. That is an important line that has not yet been crossed.
If and when it gets crossed, that’s when I stop telling myself my fears are overblown.