Krauthammer is Just as Bad as DeLay

In his weekly Washington Post column, Charles Krauthammer manages to go from sagacious to thuggish in just a few graphs.

He begins:

Provocation is no excuse for derangement. And there has been plenty of provocation: decades of an imperial judiciary unilaterally legislating radical social change on the flimsiest of constitutional pretexts. But while that may explain, it does not justify the flailing, sometimes delirious attacks on the judiciary mounted by House Majority Leader Tom DeLay.

While Krauthammer is completely overreacting when he claims that the courts have radically and unjustifiably interpreted our constitution, his take on DeLay is right on the mark.

Krauthammer then goes into why he feels Brown v. Board was properly decided but how just about all subsequent cases involving judicial decree were unjustified. While we at The Yellow Line do question the rationale of a few cases over the decades, Krauthammer is over the top in his criticisms. But that’s not where he becomes thuggish.

At the end of his column, he concludes:

Yet the recent eruptions of DeLay, Cornyn and some of their fellows may, like FDR's court-packing overreaching in 1937, have a salutary effect after all -- scaring the bejesus out of judges, maybe even shocking them into a little bit of humility, something that does not seem to come to them naturally.

So threats against judges are justified so long as they succeed in getting the judges to moderate their rulings? What’s Krauthammer thinking? FDR never threatened judges with removal or violence. By suggesting that DeLay’s ends might justify his deplorable means, Krauthammer shows himself to be no better than those he claims to admonish.