Time: Wed Mar 19 12:19:58 1997
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Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997 12:02:53 -0800
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: It's Time to Hold Federal Judges Accountable -- March
  1997  Phyllis Schlafly Report (fwd)

<snip>
> http://eagleforum.org/psr/1997/mar97/psrmar97.html
> 
> The Phyllis Schlafly Report
> 
>          -- Vol. 30, No. 8 * Box 618, Alton, Illinois 62002 * March 1997 --
> 
>                 It's Time to Hold Federal Judges Accountable
> 
>           Senator Orrin Hatch has taken exception to the New York
>           Times' criticism of his record as chairman of the
>           Senate Judiciary Committee, and he wrote a letter to
>           the editor to object. (2-19-97) The Times had
>           complained that Republican Senators have "politicized"
>           the judicial confirmation process by not confirming
>           enough of Clinton's judicial nominees.
> 
>           Not so, says Hatch, and he has the numbers to prove it.
>           He proudly asserts that the Senate has confirmed 202 of
>           Clinton's judges. That's more than President Bush's
>           (194), more than President Reagan's (164), and more
>           than President Nixon's (191) during each of their first
>           terms. Hatch added, "None of these judges would have
>           been confirmed without Republican cooperation."
> 
>           It is not only shocking that Republican Senators have
>           cooperated in confirming Clinton's 202 federal judges,
>           but it is just as shocking that Orrin Hatch is bragging
>           about it. In allowing themselves to be coopted by Bill
>           Clinton, Republican Senators have failed to accept
>           their constitutional "advice and consent"
>           responsibilities.
> 
>           The federal judges appointed by Bill Clinton and Jimmy
>           Carter are the biggest threat to constitutional self
>           government today. These activist judges have been
>           writing liberal opinions into the law, usurping
>           legislative functions, and depriving Americans of our
>           rights of self-government.
> 
>           Last November 15, Senator Hatch made a speech to the
>           Federalist Society in which he said, "Those nominees
>           who are or will be judicial activists should not be
>           nominated by the President or confirmed by the Senate,
>           and I personally will do my best to see to it that they
>           are not." Sounds good, doesn't it?
> 
>           But Senator Hatch and Republican leader Bob Dole
>           enthusiastically confirmed Clinton's most activist
>           Supreme Court nominee, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Her Supreme
>           Court opinion forcing Virginia Military Institute to
>           admit women is typical feminist judicial extremism and
>           was wholly predictable at the time of her appointment.
>           Where were Orrin Hatch and Republican Senators then?
>           They didn't even ask Ginsburg any questions about her
>           own published writings in support of radical feminist
>           goals to fundamentally change our Constitution. (See
>           the Phyllis Schlafly Report, July 1993)
>          ______________________________________________
> 
>           Use the Impeachment Power!
>           Instead of cooperating in confirming Clinton's judges,
>           Republicans should be talking about impeaching the
>           Clinton and Carter judges who have been usurping
>           legislative and executive functions. Article III states
>           that "The Judges, both of the Supreme and inferior
>           Courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior,"
>           and it is not "good behavior" to hand down rulings
>           based on personal social views rather than the
>           Constitution's words.
> 
>           David Barton of the Texas-based organization called
>           WallBuilders has just published a handbook called
>           Impeachment, in which he lays out the constitutional
>           foundations for using impeachment to curb our present
>           overactive judiciary. (WallBuilders, P.O. Box 397,
>           Aledo, TX 76008, 817-441-6044)
> 
>           The Constitution contains six clauses about
>           impeachment. The House of Representatives has the sole
>           power of impeachment (the presentation of formal
>           charges). The Senate has the sole power to try
>           impeachments, and conviction requires a two-thirds
>           vote. Punishment can be removal from office or removal
>           plus a bar against future office-holding.
> 
>           Impeachment is not a criminal proceeding, and Congress
>           cannot impose civil or criminal penalties. Contrary to
>           current popular misconceptions, the offense for which a
>           judge may be impeached does not have to be a crime or
>           have any statutory or criminal basis. Barton quotes
>           numerous Founders to prove that they viewed impeachment
>           as a remedy for a broad range of non-statutory offenses
>           such as (in George Mason's words) "attempts to subvert
>           the Constitution," or (in Alexander Hamilton's words)
>           "violation of some public trust."
> 
>           Even that great advocate of judicial power, Chief
>           Justice John Marshall, wrote during impeachment
>           proceedings against Justice Samuel Chase for his
>           arbitrary use of judicial power that "a Judge giving a
>           legal opinion contrary to the opinion of the
>           legislature is liable to impeachment." Carter and
>           Clinton judges are constantly making rulings contrary
>           to what the legislature intended.
> 
>           The impeachment cases brought during our country's
>           first half-century involved non-statutory offenses,
>           such as judicial high-handedness. It's easy to think of
>           some current judges who could be targets for
>          impeachment on that charge.
> 
>           When President Gerald Ford was a Congressman, he
>           proposed the impeachment of one of the most liberal of
>           all Supreme Court Justices, William O. Douglas. Ford,
>           who was a moderate in every sense of the word,
>           explained Congress's tremendous and far-reaching power
>           of impeachment: "An impeachable offense is whatever a
>           majority of the House of Representatives considers it
>           to be at a given moment in history; conviction results
>           from whatever offense or offenses two-thirds of the
>           other body [the Senate] considers to be sufficiently
>           serious to require removal of the accused from office."
> 
>           When we open the topic of impeachment, we hear a lot of
>           impassioned talk about preserving the "independence" of
>           the judiciary. That's really a cover to shield federal
>           judges from accountability. The Founders did not intend
>           life tenure for federal judges to saddle us with a
>           judicial oligarchy.
> 
>           In our intricate constitutional system of interlacing
>           checks and balances, the legislative and executive
>           branches are held accountable by frequent elections.
>           Judges should be held accountable by the Senate's
>           "advice and consent" power to withhold confirmation,
>           and by the House's power to impeach judges for lack of
>           "good behavior."
> 
>           Stop Federalizing Local Crimes
>           Americans were shocked when Congressional
>           investigations in 1995 unfolded the truth about the
>           fatal tragedies at Ruby Ridge, Idaho and Waco, Texas.
>           In the former, an innocent woman and child were killed
>           in cold blood by an FBI sharpshooter, and in the
>           latter, 80 American men, women and children were
>           incinerated by the Federal Government in a full-scale
>           military attack. Both events involved outrageous abuses
>           of power by federal law enforcement agencies, followed
>           by lies, coverups, and destruction of evidence.
> 
>           The Senators on the Terrorism, Technology and
>           Government Information Subcommittee could not conceal
>           their amazement at how busybody federal agents had
>           manufactured the Ruby Ridge case out of virtually
>           nothing into a monstrosity that involved millions of
>           dollars, an 18-month siege of a little cabin on a
>           remote Idaho mountain, a federal assault force of 400
>           agents armed with sub-machine guns, and the killing of
>           innocent people.
> 
>           These tragedies have changed the way Americans view
>           federal law enforcement agencies and jeopardized public
>           confidence in government itself. It's no wonder that
>           people distrust government today and that ordinary
>           Americans have concluded that the government is our
>           enemy, not our friend.
> 
>           What concerns us here is not merely the actions of
>           certain federal employees, but the involvement of the
>           Federal Government in the first place.
> 
>           Ruby Ridge and Waco were, constitutionally speaking,
>           none of the Federal Government's business. Neither
>           incident involved interstate activity or posed a threat
>           to the Federal Government.
> 
>           The underlying problem is that so many criminal laws
>           and laws regulating firearms have been federalized.
>           Until very recent years, everything involved at Ruby
>           Ridge and Waco would have been handled under state and
>           local laws (if, indeed, there were anything to handle
>           at all, since the Ruby Ridge sequence of events started
>           only when a BATF agent entrapped Randy Weaver into
>           committing a minor firearms violation).
> 
>           Former Attorney General Edwin Meese believes that these
>           outrages require remedies that are much more
>           fundamental than the mere suspension and forced
>           retirement of several agents.
> 
>           Federalizing crime contradicts constitutional
>           principles, according to Edwin Meese. The U.S.
>           Constitution gave Congress jurisdiction over only three
>           crimes: treason, counterfeiting, and piracy on the high
>           seas and offenses against the law of nations. The
>           Constitution left responsibility for public safety
>           solely in the domain of the states.
> 
>           Congress, however, has created more than 3,000 federal
>           crimes, many of them redundant with state laws. Hardly
>           any crime, no matter how local, is now beyond the
>           jurisdiction of federal criminal authorities.
> 
>           Meese accurately says that federalizing crime increases
>           "the potential for an oppressive and burdensome federal
>           police state."
> 
>           Ruby Ridge and Waco proved that proposition when the
>           federal agents who testified before the Senate
>           investigating committee expressed no apology for their
>           actions. They repeatedly said that they would take the
>           same course of action if they had it to do all over
>           again. Attorney General Janet Reno stoutly maintained
>           that the Justice Department made no mistakes during the
>           Waco debacle.
> 
>           One of the worst effects of federalizing crime is the
>           added jurisdiction and power this gives to the federal
>           courts. Activist federal judges have greatly expanded
>           the rights of criminal defendants, have further
>           burdened law-enforcement agencies, and have virtually
>           taken over the operation of 80 percent of all state
>           prison systems. Arrogant federal judges have overturned
>           or altered jury findings and verdicts, contrary to the
>           specific powers given to juries, which are enumerated
>           in the Sixth and Seventh Amendments to the U.S.
>           Constitution.
> 
>           Another part of the federalizing of crime is the
>           criminalization of environmental regulations. Many of
>           these federal environmental crimes are local in nature,
>           and they are often so vague that some property owners
>           violate the law without realizing it.
> 
>           Crime often tops the list when voters are asked what
>           they are concerned about, and Republicans like to pose
>           as law-and-order spokesmen. That's why many
>           politicians, seeking to portray themselves as tough on
>           crime, have passed so many laws creating new federal
>           crimes and stiffer penalties. They should know that
>           these laws are not in harmony with our Constitution and
>           that crime is most effectively fought at the local
>           level, anyway.
> 
>           Republicans also do a lot of talking about their
>>           devotion to the Tenth Amendment. If they are sincere,
>           Congress should wipe off the books all the federal
>           crimes that contravene the principles of the Tenth
>           Amendment or that are redundant with state crimes. It's
>           time for Members of Congress to admit that
>           law-and-order is a state and local function and address
>           themselves to the real problems that are properly
>           Congress's responsibility.
> 
>           ____________________________________________
> 
>           The Legal Services Corporation Should Be Abolished
> 
>           The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is the acid test
>           to demonstrate whether or not the Republican Congress
>           really intends to reform and reduce Big Government and
>           restrain the Imperial Judiciary. If the Republicans
>           merely play around with smoke and mirrors, pretending
>           to correct abuses, but leave the money faucet turned
>           on, they will have betrayed their mandate from the 1994
>           and 1996 elections and left their enemies with a gun
>           pointed at their head.
> 
>           When most people think of legal aid services, they
>           think of helping victims who can't afford a lawyer,
>           especially women and children. LSC is actually a giant
>           national network of tax-funded lawyers who file
>           lawsuits before liberal judges in order to implement a
>           radical social and political agenda. LSC lawyers
>           provide activist federal judges with legal jargon to
>           rationalize usurping legislative and executive
>           functions.
> 
>           LSC lawyers work for such causes as preventing the
>           eviction of drug dealers from public housing, shielding
>           violent offenders' criminal records from the public,
>           getting perks for prison inmates, maintaining taxpayer
>           benefits for illegal aliens, and releasing mental
>           patients (who often then join the ranks of the
>           homeless).
> 
>           When LSC lawyers talk about conducting "research" and
>           facilitating "training," they are using euphemisms for
>           political organizing and lobbying for pro-gay-rights,
>           pro-abortion, pro-welfare-entitlement, pro-criminal,
>           pro-drug, and pro-illegal-alien causes.
> 
>           Interference in Elections. The most recent LSC outrage
>           is the attempt to overturn an election that LSC lawyers
>           didn't like. An LSC grantee, Texas Rural Legal Aid
>           (TRLA), which gets 80 percent of its funding from the
>           U.S. taxpayers, is trying to overturn the narrow
>           elections of a Republican County Commissioner and a
>           Republican Sheriff by suing to get a federal court to
>           void the absentee ballots of 800 U.S. active duty
>           military personnel and their families. TRLA's
>           outlandish argument is that the military absentees
>           diluted the votes of Hispanic residents.
> 
>           U.S. District Judge George J. Korbel authorized
>           discovery, and so TRLA sent a 24-page, 54-question
>           deposition to all Val Verde County, Texas voters who
>           cast absentee ballots in the November 1996 election.
>           This extremely nosy questionnaire demands very personal
>           information in extraordinary detail. The questionnaire
>           demands lengthy written answers to questions about each
>           voter's credit cards, bank accounts, stock brokerage
>           accounts, insurance, the names of every organization to
>           which the voter belongs, all schools and colleges
>           attended by the voter's children and whether tuition
>           was paid or not, and where the voter's spouse sleeps at
>           night.
> 
>           On January 8, LSC's Washington office sent a letter to
>           TRLA stating that this lawsuit "constitutes a
>           substantial violation of the grant agreement." But that
>           letter didn't have any impact. TRLA further defied
>           Congress by asking for attorney's fees, despite a clear
>           prohibition on that practice.
> 
>           LSC Has Spent $5 Billion since 1974. If the leftwing
>           lawyers had merely torched the money, that wouldn't
>           have been nearly as destructive as spending the money
>           the way they did. LSC lawyers spent the money to
>           litigate and lobby to increase entitlements (for
>           welfare, aliens, criminals, etc.) that are the chief
>           cause of federal deficits. Howard Phillips, who has
>           been monitoring LSC since 1970 when President Nixon
>           appointed him to a position that included that
>           responsibility, estimates that LSC activism has added
>           $2 trillion to the national debt.
> 
>           LSC's litigation deserves a large share of the blame
>           for our out-of-control, failed welfare system. LSC
>           initiated the case, King v. Smith, in which the Supreme
>           Court ruled in 1968 that the behavior of welfare
>           mothers, including cohabiting with wage-earning males,
>           could not be considered when determining eligibility
>           for benefits. In Shapiro v. Thompson in 1969, LSC got
>           the Supreme Court to ban the one-year residency
>           requirement for welfare eligibility. In 1970, in
>           Goldberg v. Kelly, LSC persuaded the Supreme Court to
>           require a hearing process before benefits can be cut
>           off for any reason. As a result, hardly anyone is ever
>           cut off.
> 
>           The theory behind these cases, invented by LSC
>           tax-funded lawyers, is that welfare recipients have a
>           property right in their benefits, just like the rest of
>           us have a property right in our houses or automobiles.
>           This off-the-wall rationale has become the cornerstone
>           of the welfare rights movement, which has changed our
>           laws and picked the pockets of taxpayers.
> 
>           Another favorite LSC constituency is incarcerated
>           convicted felons. LSC's class action suit against the
>           North Carolina prison system resulted in a requirement
>           that each of 13 prisons provide softball and basketball
>           equipment for two teams, a piano, a set of drums, three
>           guitars, and five frisbees. Another LSC victory was to
>           establish Chicago prisoners' rights to cable television
>           and expensive weight rooms.
> 
>           Other exotic LSC lawsuits included representing
>           transsexuals in an effort to overturn Georgia's
>           prohibition on Medicaid reimbursement for sex change
>           operations, forcing public housing officials to rent
>           apartments to unemancipated minors, and trying to
>           define opium and alcohol addiction as a disability
>           under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
> 
>           How LSC Nullifies "Reforms." Congress had planned to
>           terminate LSC in 1995, but because of bleeding-heart
>           whining about the "poor," Congress relented and
>           extended LSC's life with some reasonable restrictions
>           to try to de-politicize it. Congress banned the filing
>           of class-action lawsuits and prohibited LSC grantees
>           from pursuing politically controversial cases, even
>           with non-LSC funds. The handful of Republican
>           "moderates" plus the Democrats who engineered this
>           life-support system for LSC assured us that LSC would
>           clean up its act and devote itself to its real mission
>           of helping the poor.
> 
>           LSC responded by committing a raft of new offenses,
>           such as the interference in the Texas election
>           (described above) and filing lawsuits to get the
>           federal courts to overturn the new Congressional
>           regulations.
> 
>           For the last 20 years, LSC grantees have evaded the
>           laws against political advocacy by claiming that they
>           were pursuing political cases with "non-LSC" money.
>           This loophole is big enough to drive thousands of
>           lawsuits through because money is fungible and nobody
>           can identify what money is being spent for which suit.
>           Most LSC money comes from the federal taxpayers, who
>>           pay for LSC attorneys' salaries and overhead. Since
>           Congress cannot force grantees to open their case
>           files, there is no way to prove allocation of the
>           funds.
> 
>           Congress certainly should have the right to appropriate
>>           taxpayers' money only to those who agree not to engage
>           in class-action suits or political advocacy, and that
>           was one of the reforms passed in the previous Congress.
> 
>           LSC lawyers have counterattacked through the courts. An
>           LSC grantee in New York, Legal Services for the
>          Elderly, persuaded a New York state judge to rule on
>           December 26, 1996 that it is unconstitutional for
>           Congress to prohibit LSC grantees from engaging in
>           class-action lawsuits or pursuing political litigation
>           with non-LSC funds. Manhattan Supreme Court Justice
>           Beverly Cohen ruled that Congress has no right to tell
>           LSC grantees what kind of cases they can pursue with
>           non-LSC money. Judge Cohen said that this restriction
>           is just a "thinly disguised attack on basic freedoms,"
>           i.e., the "basic freedom" of tax-funded LSC lawyers to
>           engage in class-action or political litigation.
> 
>           This decision inspired other LSC groups to challenge
>           the new Congressional restrictions. Five LSC-funded
>           groups filed suit in federal district court in Hawaii,
>           and on February 19, 1997, Federal Judge Alan Kay struck
>           down the new Congressional restrictions on the way LSC
>           lawyers spend nonfederal funds. A federal judge in
>           Rhode Island and a Ohio state judge have also granted
>           temporary relief to legal aid groups and allowed them
>           to continue work on their class action suits.
> 
>           LSC Can't Be Reformed. LSC lawyers have no intention of
>           abiding by any restrictions, and when they bring their
>           cases before Carter-appointed or Clinton-appointed
>           judges, they have a good chance of outmaneuvering any
>           restrictions Congress tries to impose. LSC lawyers have
>           constructed for themselves such a Byzantine,
>           self-perpetuating infrastructure and grant-making
>           mechanism that they are accountable to no one: not to
>           Congress, or to the Administration, or to the people
>           they serve, or to the taxpayers who foot the bills.
>           Hillary Rodham Clinton used to be LSC's chairman of the
>           board, and LSC has continued to be peopled with
>          leftwing attorneys who share her class-warfare ideology
>           and socialist goals.
> 
>           Radical leftwing activism is part and parcel of the
>           Legal Services Corporation. It is a fraud on the public
>           to pretend it can be reformed. LSC functions as a pot
>           of gold for leftwing lawyers to litigate and lobby for
>           radical causes. This scandal-ridden agency must be
>           completely abolished. The 1996 Republican Party
>           Platform called for the elimination of the Legal
>           Services Corporation. It's time to fulfill that pledge
>           before LSC engages in any more mischief.
<snip>

========================================================================
Paul Andrew, Mitchell, B.A., M.S.    : Counselor at Law, federal witness
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========================================================================


      


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