The only reason I can really think of that Frist and his…. um… cohorts would really want to go forward on dropping the filibuster from its place in our system is that they never intend to be in the minority again – and thus would have no use for it themselves.

Shouldn’t this alone give us pause? It is perhaps one of the most important signals, along with trying to get rid of the judicial checks and balances, that our system is being overturned rather than simply leaning further and further to the right.

The neo-cons, called the neo-liberals outside the US, want a one-party system, and if you look into the beliefs of some of their leaders, you will be hard put to decide whether they are more interested in a hate-based apocalyptic theocracy or an economic and military imperialism. I don’t believe that most of their loyalists really understand what is happening at all. Half of this country, manipulated by propaganda, exploited and kept busy, apparently motivated by fear or hatred rather than compassion or ethics, and with a strange relationship to figures of authority, appear to have blinded themselves to what is actually happening here. Alexis de Toqueville predicted the danger of the tyranny of such a majority years ago, and his solution to the dangers of such appear to the very things that are currently under threat in our government, the checks and balances of our system.

“If, on the other hand, a legislative power could be so constituted as to represent the majority without necessarily being the slave of its passions, an executive so as to retain a proper share of authority, and a judiciary so as to remain independent of the other two powers, a government would be formed which would be democratic while incurring scarely any risk of tyranny.”

So now we have government officials threatening simply to shut down courts with judges they don’t like. We have officials in the legislative and executive branches actually inciting violence against judges. Yet some of the few judicial nominees that haven’t already been approved actually write their briefs based on ideology, without regard for the actual law at all! Somehow they are not considered “activist judges.”

My husband told me about a recent special he caught on television, about the history of Hawai’i.
He was very moved by the testimony of a woman who said something like this, “Missionaries came, and they told us to raise our eyes to their God in the sky. When we raised our eyes up to the sky – they stole our land.”