Monday, January 23, 2006
Day of Judgment
If you read the following:
Bush nominee broke law
...Federal law and the official Code of Conduct for U.S. judges explicitly prohibit judges from sitting on cases involving companies in which they own stock -- no matter how small their holdings -- in order to uphold the integrity of the judicial system. (Judges' financial filings typically don't differentiate ownership between the judge and immediate family members.) The clear-cut, objective standard aims to prevent even the appearance that a judge may be taking into consideration his or her personal financial interests...."There's no wriggle room here," says professor Stephen Gillers, a scholar of legal ethics at the New York University School of Law. "It's not just an ethics rule, it's a congressional statute -- a law." Even if he doesn't make any orders during the proceedings, he can't be the judge on such a case, Gillers says. "He's disqualified, period."
who would you think they were talking about?
My mind immediately jumped to Samuel Alito and his double dealing with Vanguard.
But no, the quotation comes from a Salon article by Will Evans and refers to Judge James H. Payne, nominated to sit on the 10th Circuit out of Denver.
The article makes it clear how widespread this form of corruption is in our judiciary.
It doesn't excuse it. In fact, it boggles the mind just to imagine how many judges go to church/synagogue and read to the congregation the words of condemnation that the Bible has for judges who use their position to enrich themselves [*]-- and then leave church for the courtroom and heap judgment on their heads by their greed.
If this article is corect, it is time for a lot of judges to resign.
If they don't resign, they need to be impeached. Not for ideology, as Tom DeLay planned to do as part of his seizure of power, but for simple justice. They need to be replaced by people who don't enrich themselves by denying justice to others.
[*] These verses are generally framed in the metaphor of dishonest balances, as in Amos 8, but in context speak of anyone who has enriches himself by pretending to be fair.
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