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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