To Hell with Checks and Balances

The Constitution is over-rated, anyway.

In remarks prepared for delivery Wednesday, [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales says judges generally should defer to the will of the president and Congress when deciding national security cases. He also raps jurists who “apply an activist philosophy that stretches the law to suit policy preferences.”

The text of the speech, scheduled for delivery at the American Enterprise Institute, was obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press. It outlines, in part, what qualities the Bush administration looks for when selecting candidates for the federal bench.

“We want to determine whether he understands the inherent limits that make an unelected judiciary inferior to Congress or the president in making policy judgments,” Gonzales says in the prepared speech. “That, for example, a judge will never be in the best position to know what is in the national security interests of our country.”

Let me see if I've got this straight. The Attorney General wants to make sure that the President is looking for the right qualities in federal judges, by which he means, deference to the executive in matters of national security. The trick here, it seems to me, is that it is not the job of federal judges "to know what is in the national security interests of our country;" it is the job of federal judges to know what is and isn't consistent with the Constitution of the US. This is like saying that we won't hire political science faculty at a college who don't "know enough about biology" to know that the bio department should be running the school.

Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court justice, has in the past warned about judges who inject their personal beliefs in cases. But his prepared remarks Wednesday mark his sharpest words over concerns about the federal judiciary — the third, and equal, branch of government.

Judges who “apply an activist philosophy that stretches the law to suit policy preferences, they actually reduce the credibility and authority of the judiciary,” Gonzales says. “In so doing, they undermine the rule of law that strengthens our democracy.”

Isn't it ironic? Apparently, public political attacks on federal judges do nothing to undermine the independence of the judiciary ("the third, and equal, branch of government"), and appointing judges based on their willingness to defer to an imperial presidency does not "undermine the rule of law that strengthens our democracy."

And war is peace, too, by the way. Viva Baghdad!