Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann, one of the most controversial members of the House of Representatives, one of the leaders of the Tea Party Caucus in the House, and infamous for outrageous statements and actions and for promoting political confrontations, has now gone beyond the pale.
She has decided that members of Congress should take “courses” on the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights, all designed to promote the “conservative” interpretation of these sacred documents.
Anyone serving in Congress should be expected to KNOW these documents by heart, and should NOT be promoting a distorted view of these documents, as Michele Bachmann and her ilk have been doing for years already! And to allow the Tea Party Movement, with its distortion of history and reality, to be the so called “cosponsor” of this series of seminars is even more outrageous!
But it gets worse, as Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, the most conservative member of the Court in the past hundred years, and a promoter of “originalism”–the concept that every legal decision should be based only on 1787 and the Constitutional Convention, with no consideration of modern times or changes in the 223 years since 1787–has agreed to give the first seminar on “separation of powers”!
Does not Justice Scalia realize that “separation of powers” means just that, and that therefore, it is inappropriate for him to be trying to influence or in any other way involve himself with actions of the legislative branch? 🙁
The Supreme Court is supposed to be non-political in nature, but apparently if a conservative such as Scalia wishes to be political, that is alright. And if Justice Clarence Thomas’s wife wishes to become involved in a pressure group that could theoretically have an influence on future cases before the Court, that apparently is fine! 🙁
But imagine if Justices Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sonia Sotomayor, or Elena Kagan were to lecture to a liberal Democratic group or advocate a modernist view to people on Capitol Hill, you can be assured there would be moves to impeach them as having violated “separation of powers”!
This is the double standard, the hypocrisy, of conservatives, Republicans, and the Tea Party Movement, who all claim to be “holier than thou”, when they are engaged in clearcut violations of the Constitution by what they are doing, and what Justice Scalia has agreed to do!
But then, Justice Scalia, as brilliant as he is recognized to be, is also an extremely arrogant man! That sums it up! 🙁