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Review
Magazine - Politics
National Lawyers Guild
Considers Campaign To Impeach Supreme Court
Justices Who Stopped Florida
Count
By Scott Harris |
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The 2000 presidential
election was decided when the Supreme Court voted 5
to 4 in the Bush vs. Gore case to stop the vote count in Florida. Since
then, anger at the defects in the U.S. electoral system has simmered below
the radar screen of the corporate media. In fact, few questions about the
unprecedented role of the Supreme Court in selecting the U.S. president
have been raised by major American newspapers and television networks.
Mainstream commentators, by and large, have urged critics unhappy with
George W. Bush's bizarre road to the White House to "get over it."
Some activists have turned their attention toward correcting the flaws
in the U.S. electoral system by proposing measures that include abolition
of the Electoral College; advocacy for a system of instant run-off voting;
and modernization of election machinery. But not everyone has forgotten
what many critics view as the blatant partisanship of the Supreme Court in
the Florida decision.
The executive committee of the National Lawyers Guild recently recommended
that Guild members undertake a nationwide campaign to impeach those five
conservative Supreme Court Justices who voted to stop the state of
Florida's vote count.
The proposal, already endorsed by the Democratic Party of Oregon, will be
voted on by Guild members at their national convention in October. Recently
I spoke with Nathan Newman, vice president of the National Lawyers Guild,
who explains why he is advocating the launch of a campaign to impeach
Justices William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O'Connor, Clarence
Thomas and Anthony Kennedy.
Newman: Bush v. Gore shocked so many people when it came down -- to be
honest -- because most legal scholars, liberal and conservative,
said there was no legal basis for the decision. It was frankly surprising
and shocking to even mainstream lawyers. Now, for a group
like the National Lawyers Guild, which has more progressive views on where
the law should be, it was more an example of how the Supreme Court has
become essentially a lawless institution.
Between The Lines: What would be the mechanism by which you would
undertake an impeachment proceeding against these particular five Supreme
Court justices?
Newman: If there is political support and general commitment from a range
of progressive groups to do this, the first step is to build political
support across the country. Impeachment is the same process people became
familiar with in the last few years. You go through the House of
Representatives where House members bring a bill of impeachment. If a
majority of House members vote to impeach, the five justices are then
impeached. They are not removed. Impeachment is actually the first step. If
they're impeached, it goes over to the
Senate, where there's a trial and it would then take a two-thirds vote of
the Senate to actually remove them from office.
I think it's worth understanding, especially for the National Lawyers
Guild, that this is not for us whether Al Gore or George Bush won. That's
actually relatively irrelevant. What is the issue is that people were
denied their vote.
Between The Lines: I would imagine that there would be many Democratic
legislators in both the House and Senate reluctant to put their name on
this proposal, given that it is quite dramatic, maybe thought of as
radical. Certainly the media has told us time and again that there's really
no need for further action or angst about the election in 2000. A lot of
people have bought that line, particularly those in power in Washington. Is
your feeling that this effort to impeach should be undertaken whether you
could realistically win or not? That it's important to go through the trial
and discovery to make the point to the nation and the world that we don't
take our democracy lightly?
Newman: Well, look at two parts. One is the short term, one is the long
term. I think it's quite reasonable to say in the short term, it's unlikely
we'll be able to remove these people from office, especially with 50
Republicans in the Senate.
However, what is happening right now is, as the Supreme Court goes after
these decisions -- civil rights, labor -- they are essentially attacking
the legitimacy of a whole set of progressive values and laws. And just to
challenge them ideologically -- to say these (justices) are not legitimate
people, they have acted illegitimately, will also help say that the
decisions they are making are not legitimate, and will help in that fight
to preserve those laws and to override them in a number of different ways.
The Supreme Court, as people have noted in the past -- when they are not
creating the election returns as they did last fall as people say -- they
also follow the elections. They worry about their legitimacy to the extent
that you attack them, they will yield. They are not a completely isolated,
depolicitized institution as we saw last fall. So a political challenge to
them will have that short term effect.
But the longer-term effect is this: You have to put this in some context.
In the early part of this century, for example, in 1905, there was a
classic case called the Lochner decision where the Supreme Court said, "You
can't have maximum hour laws. If an employer wants to force people to work
80 hours a week, we're not going to let you legislate to stop that."
It took 30 years of struggle until the New Deal, basically 1937, before the
Supreme Court was forced to back off of those kinds of decisions. Not
coincidentally, 1937 was the year the National Lawyers Guild was actually
established and one of its first acts at its founding convention was to
call for restraint on the power of the Supreme Court to strike down laws
just because it didn't like them.
Between The Lines: In your view, how much damage has been done to democracy
with the Bush v. Gore decision by the Supreme Court?
Newman: : It depends on how strong a state you thought it was in before
that. I think what Bush v. Gore did was reveal the state it was in. Before
Bush v. Gore, we didn't know 2-4 million votes that were cast were thrown
out. We didn't know that these sort of irregularities were happening. We
didn't know that if you were in a poor community, your votes were much less
likely to count than in a rich community. I shouldn't say we didn't know.
Some people knew and had been arguing about this problem for years, but it
brought it to national consciousness.
So, at one level, you can argue that what Bush v. Gore did was not damage
our democracy, but give us an opportunity to improve our democracy, to
actually understand the lessons that came out and actually do something
about it.
That's the debate we're trying to have -- to say, what do we do with the
Supreme Court. But, more broadly, looking at the role of the courts, our
election system has had, to build a real, new democracy movement in this
country. To talk about making sure not only every vote counts, but every
person counts. That civil rights are enforced, that average workers have
the same say as somebody with a million dollars in our system. Because it isn't just a
question of
making votes count, it's a question of making sure that economic inequality
isn't used to deny votes as well.
Contact the National Lawyers Guild by calling (212) 627-2656 or visit their
Web site at http://www.nlg.org
Scott Harris is WPKN Radio's public affairs director and executive producer
of Between The Lines. This interview excerpt was featured on
the award-winning, syndicated weekly radio newsmagazine, Between The Lines. |
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