submitted to the jury from Liberal Street Fighter
Well, not the law itself, but the books that are its physical embodiment have a musty, dusty, old, leather, decaying paper, slightly-dampish-like-an-old-person’s-house kind of smell. You see, I was taken on a tour of the Marquette University Law School Law Library today, and that smell was lingering down every aisle, every section we walked through. It wafted up out of 19th Century Wisconsin Reports as I opened them to scan the cases within.
I was enchanted. There were case law books going back over a couple of centuries. Old books with pages fragile to the touch. Some books w/ beautiful leather covers, others with printing so small one gets the sense that they were trying to cram as much of the case law into them as they could, to save space and money. Regional recorders with Indian Territory included as one of the regions covered, before it became the state of Oklahoma.
All of this history, this ongoing work-in-progress that is American Jurisprudence, housed in Sensenbrenner Hall …
… named for a benefactor of Marquette University, also the grandfather of one of the Republicans most avidly doing his utmost to trash the independence of the Judiciary and the protection of every American citizen’s privacy, Rep F. James Sensenbrenner Jr.
As Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep Sensenbrenner has pushed for the renewal of USA PATRIOT Act, supported the Bankruptcy Reform Act Usurers Protection Act, the REAL ID Act (which Governors have warned will drive up the costs of getting drivers licenses) and the Flag Burning Amendment to the Constitution.
Perhaps most egregiously, he has recently sent a letter to the Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals demanding that the judges change a sentence that Sensenbrenner didn’t like, in defiance of legal precedent and the Separation of Powers, the two very things that underpin our civil society. As the American Judicature Society put it in a statement released last week:
“Our concern is . . . that this incident is another in a distressingly long series of incidents that demonstrate Mr. Sensenbrenner’s ignorance of the proper functions of Congress with respect to the federal judiciary and his arrogance in purporting to speak for the American people when attempting to bully federal judges,” Stephen Burbank, chairman of the society’s Task Force on Judicial Independence and Accountability, said in a prepared statement.
The Washington Post also condemned his meddling in a strongly worded editorial today:
As a matter of law, Mr. Sensenbrenner is simply wrong. An age-old legal principle — reaffirmed in 1999 by a unanimous Supreme Court — holds that you cannot get relief from an appeals court without appealing. Courts make mistakes all the time, and when parties don’t appeal, they’re out of luck. Indeed, Mr. Sensenbrenner’s committee is busy writing legislation to make it harder for federal courts to entertain such questions when convicts raise them.
Even were he right on the law, however, the intervention in a pending matter is an intolerable affront to the independence of the courts. The government is represented in criminal cases by the executive branch, not by Congress. For the powerful chairman of a congressional committee to demand a particular result from a court in the name of “oversight” contains at least an implicit threat of retribution. Mr. Sensenbrenner, at the end of his letter, asks for “a prompt response.” Judge Flaum acknowledged receipt of the letter but declined to address the merits of the issue, citing the ethical bar to publicly commenting on “pending or impending judicial proceedings.” We have, for Mr. Sensenbrenner, a two-word response: Back off.
The assault on our legal system by the Republican Party has been relentless, and Representative Sensenbrenner has been one of the worst abusers. I learned today that the law smells, but it’s a warm smell, a smell born of age and faith in reason and tradition. The stench coming off of Sensenbrenner and his cadre of barbarians is the rot of corruption, of blind mindless faith in ideology.
The law may smell, but Rep. Sensenbrenner’s actions reek, and are unbecoming of a legislator and a member of the bar.