The Daily Background

One of the favorite election-year targets that Republicans love to demonize are these so-called ‘activist judges.’ The idea is that the judiciary needs to be reigned in by Congress, because they’re busy making radical decisions that threaten America. Like the decision that all human beings are equal and have to be treated in accordance with the law– and that therefore the Bush Administration’s approach to detainees is unconstitutional. Or the decision that all human beings are equal and that therefore must be afforded equal rights (like the right to marry who you love, for example).

Of course, if there’s any branch of government that needs to be reigned in, it’s the executive branch. But that aside, conservatives love to pick on judges, and often use them as a campaign issue. We’ll stop these terrible ‘activist judges’ from forcing their awful pro-equality agenda on us, they promise. There have been reports of attacks on judges by extreme right-wingers, and recently former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor revealed another one from her time on the nation’s highest bench, that was previously unheard of:

She has crossed the country warning that “spurious” attacks on the judiciary — by politicians and other talking heads — threaten judges’ doing their jobs without fear or favor.

When federal appellate Judge Danny Boggs said at a Friday legal conference at Las Colinas that physical assaults aimed at judges have come mainly from “the deranged,” O’Connor underscored the safety concerns.

“Every member of the Supreme Court received a wonderful package of home-baked cookies, and I don’t know why, the staff decided to analyze them,” she recounted. “Each one contained enough poison to kill the entire membership of the court.”

Phew. That’s pretty awful. No idea if whoever did it was caught or not, since it’s the first we’ve heard of this particular incident. Very bad though, and the staff decided to test them just to make sure, which it appears happened on a whim. Naturally they have tighter security measures of course. Since we don’t know who did it, we can’t say whether it was a right-winger or what that did it, but it’s clear that the extreme anti-judge rheotric (’activist judges are hurting America,’ etc) from many Republican politicians does not help things at all. Earlier this year, ultra-conservative pundit Ann Coulter suggested that somebody poison liberal Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

Update: NYT adds:

Although the episode was not publicly disclosed when it occurred in April 2005, it had a public, although little-noticed, denouement last month when the sender of the poisoned cookies was sentenced in federal court here to 15 years in prison.

Filed under: Supreme Court, Z-TDB Blog