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19 December 2011

Gingrich: First Let's Lock Up the Judges

GOP nomination front runner Newt Gingrich's rheotric offers a stunningly dytopian approach to dealing with judges whose rulings he disagrees with:

With just weeks to go before the Iowa Caucus, Newt Gingrich . . . former House Speaker held a half-hour phone call on Saturday during which he pledged to abolish courts and eliminated activist judges he believed were either outside the mainstream or infringing too deeply on the commander in chief's authority.

On Sunday, he followed that up by saying he would be willing to arrest a judge who he thought was out of line.

"If you had to," he said on CBS's "Face the Nation" when asked if he would send a Capitol Hill police officer to round up a judge, "or you would instruct the Justice Department to send the U.S. Marshal."

The result, of course, would be a constitutional crisis in which the decision of the U.S. Marshal in question about who to obey would be hard to determine and an impeachment effort would surely follow.

Newt Gingrich seems bound and determined to become yet another Republican hellbent on dismantling our system of government and showing would be voters that he is too crazy and extreme to be trusted to lead the free world. But, apparently, the activist Republican grass roots are hungering for crazy.

Gingrich also claims that the President has the authority to defy federal court orders.

The extreme rhetoric cost Gingrich the endorsement of Iowa's leading newspaper, less than three weeks before their first in the nation Presidential nomination caucus:

The Des Moines Register, when announcing its endorsement for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney on Saturday, lauded the former Massachusetts governor's restraint from "reckless rhetoric and moralizing" while "other candidates have pandered to extremes with attacks on the courts and sermons on Christian values."

Proposals like Gingrich's are amusing as satire, from a powerless blogger, but less amusing when they come in the form of serious discussion about a viable Presidental candidate's agenda should he take office.

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