The Bizarre Philosophy Of Bush's Court Nominee: Justice Janice Brown [View All]

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
March 31, 2005

The Bizarre Legal Philosophy of Justice Janice Rogers Brown
By MITCHELL ZIMMERMAN

Mitchell Zimmerman, a former SNCC organizer and co-author of Dr. Spock on Vietnam!, is a partner at a high-tech firm in Mountain View, California and focuses on intellectual property.

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.... Janice Rogers Brown, President Bush's nominee to the D.C. Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Brown, a member of the California Supreme Court, is one of 12 judicial nominees previously rejected due to their extremist positions, whose nominations were recently exhumed by Bush. The Senate Judiciary Committee has now begun its re-consideration of these individuals.

.... Brown believes that the New Deal was part of what she terms "the reign of socialism" and that Americans have been living under "collectivism" since the New Deal. Indeed, in an April 2000 speech to the Federalist Society, Justice Brown paired "the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937." 1917, of course, is the date of the Russian Revolution. "The latter date," Justice Brown explained "marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution."

Just what were the New Deal enactments that Justice Brown reviles as "collectivism," giving rise to these horrors? - Social Security, unemployment insurance, wage and hour and child labor laws, pure food and drug regulation, bank deposit insurance, the right to form unions, welfare benefits for the handicapped, regulation of financial institutions and stock markets, and, of course, taxation. These measures formed the foundation for a social contract that endured for generations in America, but is now under attack by the right, in which corporate supremacy was essentially unchallenged, in exchange for limited consideration of the needs of society as a whole, reasonable living standards for most Americans and minimal protections for the most desperate and needy.

The Republican judges' war on democracy has only begun, but one is reminded of Iran, in which the powers of freely elected leaders and an emerging democracy have been nullified by unelected religious leaders. If the federal judiciary comes to be dominated by the likes of Janice Rogers Brown, it may turn out to matter little who wins control of the legislative and executive branches in future elections. President Bush's ultra-conservative judicial ayatollahs will be in a position to guide and chastise the unruly majorities who fail to understand the need to elevate the interests of property in the name of the higher law.

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