We all want to have our voices heard. We all believe -we have to believe, that in some fashion, to some small degree, we are having a positive effect.
The founders of this country understood that if the majority could squelch dissent, control the media, and act with impunity, their experiment would be doomed. So they built in 'checks and balances'; they separated the legislative from the executive, the executive from the judicial.
It is perhaps not altogether surprising that when one party gains the majority they seek to consolidate their authority. By their own admission however, the Republicans in the congress have called the effort to circumvent the traditional judicial apppointment process a 'nuclear option' - a term that carries with it the notion of 'fallout'. They themselves recognize that if they use this option, the cloud on our democracy will linger long after their judicial nominees have faded into history.
We cannot allow this to happen. Please join with me in creating 8,640 one-minute speeches, each one offering powerful, personal testimony. Together they will become a 24-hour virtual filibuster.
To add your 'contribution' there are three methods: 1. 'Comment' on the latest entry, by clicking on 'comment' at the end of the entry (I will transfer the text to an entry level contribution asap) 2. Send your thoughts to MaMoveOn@Aol.com, and I will cut and paste asap. 3. To register, or if you already are registered, use the 'Blog This' button at the top of the page . For all methods, please use the title to number your contribution sequentially (see 'Number 1 02360'), and add your zip code.
Frank Mand, Plymouth, Massachusetts
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The initial impetus for this blog, was a call for 8640 voices to create a 24-hour viritual filibuster in protest of the Republicans' plan to use 'the nuclear option'! We all have at least sixty seconds worth of outrage, simmering inside, I thought. Hundreds of you let that pot come to the boil, at the Joseph Moakley Court House in Boston on April 27th, as part of our actual 24-hour filibuster and rally, and now this blog continues simmering.
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- Number 17 245 Voices
- Number 16 'Good Behavior'
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- Number 12 Who are the real judicial 'activists'?
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2 comments:
First, a quote, from the Constitution of the United States of America, Section 2, Clause 2:
... and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law...
Those are the words of the remarkable group of men who assembled to create the rules by which our great country is governed. They had all lived through a time when the courts were rigged to favor the ruling party. They had all experienced life under the tyrannical rule of a dictator whose minions controlled the legislature.
Our Constitution was forged on the anvil of bitter experience. From the wisdom gained in their struggle against tyranny, our founding fathers intentionally designed a system of government with built-in safeguards to protect citizens from a power-hungry majority. A system in which the Senate had the right to reject judges it deemed unfit to guard the rights of American citizens. A system in which the courts have the power to judge each case on its merits, where each citizen has the right to a fair trial, no matter how much the President or legislature might dislike that citizen.
If the “nuclear option” is allowed to pass, it will lay waste to the rights granted to us by the Founding Fathers. Under the nuclear option, a power-mad majority can simply wipe out the rights of anyone they don’t like by appointing judges who will rule for “their side,” ignoring the protections provided to ordinary Americans by the Constitution. With this last protection against oppression removed, America will fade to a pale shadow of its former greatness. No longer the leader of the free world, America will be the oppressor of the free.
Thanks, Rhet: thought you and other readers might like to know that, while the effort to obtain 8640 'voices' is going rather slower than I had hoped, the idea itself was translated into a real 24-hour filibuster, linked to MoveOn's judicial rallies of April 27th: we had over 400 registrants, and non-stop speakers (reading everything form the preamble to the Massachusetts Constitution to poetry by Auden)from 9 p.m. on April 26th (2005) to 9 p.m., April 27th. And all in front of the Moakley Federal Court House in Boston.
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