I know most Americans will sleep well tonight because they can rest assured that Dr. James Dobson is watching over their Supreme Court, making sure that only right-thinking people get to serve on it.
I have a suggestion for George Bush. The nomination of Mrs. Maier is absolutely silly. Drop it. And nominate Dr. James Dobson instead.
Why not? If Dr. Dobson gets to check out the nominees before anyone else does, why waste time on middle men. (Check the news — Dobson brags that Bush called him before making his nominee public.) Make Dobson Chief Justice.
Alleluia, praise the lord, God’s will will finally be done in America.
But wait.
Then he would have to go through an investigation by the FBI. And further investigation and questioning by the Senate Justice Committee. He would have to answer questions. He would have to answer questions asked by real people who don’t owe him anything. He would have to disclose information about how he runs his organization, who is on his board, who manages his money, and where it is invested, and if there are any legal actions against him.
It gets worse. During the confirmation proceedings, he would have to make public his views on social and political issues. He would have to explain his positions on abortion, birth control, sex education, parental discipline, prayer in the classroom, and all kinds of hokey stuff. He might have to express some knowledge and his views about Miranda, and due process, and habeas corpus, and privacy, and the Uniform Commercial Code, and interstate commerce, and the environment. He might actually have to demonstrate some knowledge and understanding of the basics of our system of justice.
And some Senators might be worried about going into the next re-election campaign (Senators are never “elected” in the U.S.– they just collect the cash for passing the right legislation and then get themselves “re-elected”) having to defend the choice of a totally unaccountable dingbat for the Supreme Court.
All it would take is one question: when deciding a case, do you consult the law, or your bible?
No, that won’t do at all. Let’s just let him have a veto over the actual nominees.
Dobson’s “family values”… doesn’t include any values that actually make family life better. If they did, you might hear him urge his buddies in the Senate to raise the minimum wage, which has been stalled at $5.15 an hour since 1997! I am not making that up. How much of an increase, do you suppose, top executives have received since 1997? How much of an increase do you suppose James Dobson has received since then?
Republican lawmakers, according to the NY Times, voted against the bill because they say they believe that higher wages can prevent new businesses from being viable, thereby reducing the number of jobs available to the poor. They failed to point out that they might also have more children, thereby impoverishing themselves even more.
This would be more entertaining if you ever heard these same people complain that giving too many tax breaks to the rich would end up causing them to do drugs or something.
Dobson doesn’t advocate health insurance for the poor. He doesn’t advocate for safer working conditions or racial equality or maternal or any kind of parental leave for families with newborns.
Because Dobson’s real interest is in protecting the propertied classes, and programs that actually benefit families who are not rich would cost money and require that the rich pay their fair share of taxes.
Dobson Advocates the Execution of Child Criminals
I am not making this up.
Dobson however is exuberant in supporting executions for children who commit capital crimes: “So the unchecked judiciary plows ahead. In March of this year, the Supreme Court struck down laws duly passed in 18 states permitting the execution of minors.” Dobson adds that these perpetrators, who were minors when they committed their crimes, do not “deserve” to live. In a moment of astonishing lucidity, Dobson admonished: “Justice Kennedy should be impeached for taking such a position, along with O’Connor, Ginsberg, Souter, Breyer, and Stevens, who have recently made similar statements.” The truth is, it would be fabulously helpful for everyone if Bush did in fact impeach those justices. Let’s have it out and let, as Dobson claims to believe, the American people decide who they want to be running this country.
Watch your wallet!
What’s wrong with putting Mrs.Harriet Maier on the Supreme Court?
Naw. I can’t even take the question seriously enough to begin.
By the way, if you found Margaret Atwood’s novel, “A Handmaid’s Tale”, a portrait of an America run by people like James Dobson, a little over the top, you haven’t read James Dobson.
The most charming aspect of Dobson’s vitriolic harangues on the subject is the way he carefully sneaks a fund-raising appeal into the last paragraph: send me money or America will slide into a moral abyss. Sometimes we should thank these puppet-masters for their own transparency.