Kind words...

...for my hero, and a timely caution from the New York Times editors...

Last week, Judge Stanley Birch Jr., a conservative member of the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, based in Atlanta, declared that in the Schiavo case, "the legislative and executive branches of our government have acted in a manner demonstrably at odds with our founding fathers' blueprint for the governance of a free people - our Constitution."

Judge Birch is right, but he should not be such a lonely voice. The founders established a system of government in which the three branches - legislative, executive and judicial - act as checks and balances for one another. Republicans in Congress and the Bush administration, unhappy with some rulings of the judiciary, are trying to write it out of its constitutional role. The courts will not always be popular; they will not even always be right. But if Congress succeeds in curtailing the judiciary's ability to act as a check on the other two branches, the nation will be far less free.

Subverting the Constitution is anti-American destructionism at its worst. Brendan Behan once noted that "It's not that I hate the cops. It's just that all the big bellied bastards that I do hate love the cops." Well, I don't suffer from any fantasy that judges are all above reproach, or that that I'm likely to agree with everything they have to say. All the big bellied bastards that I hate, though, seem to hate the judges, so line me up with the judiciary.