1115.org

It’s been a while since 1115 has visited the fine state of Alabama to comment on the state’s…uhm…interesting take on law and justice. A quick re-cap of previous episodes will be handy:

• Of course, a lot of us remember Roy Moore, the former Alabama Chief Justice (and current gubernatorial candidate) who was stripped of his post after refusing to remove a Ten Commandments monument he had installed in front of his courtroom, in defiance of a federal court order. Talk about judicial activism! But since judicial activism is only a bad thing when it doesn’t fall into a conservative Christian worldview, it wasn’t surprising when Moore became an instant celebrity and the monument itself went on tour throughout the country.

• Then there was the time when Alabama refused to strip segregationist language from its Constitution. The fifties and sixties were turbulent times, to be sure…but this happened in 2004.

• And just to make sure that Moore didn’t get all the headlines, judge Ashley McKathan decided to embroider the Ten Commandments on his judicial robe with gold thread.

Now that you are caught up, time for new business. Elections for Alabama’s Supreme Court are coming up soon, and four of the candidates are running on a platform that basically gives the middle finger to the federal Supreme Court:

In a debate with powerful echoes of the turbulent civil rights era, four Republicans running for Alabama’s Supreme Court are making an argument legal scholars thought was settled in the 1800s: that state courts are not bound by U.S. Supreme Court precedents.

The Constitution says federal law trumps state laws, and legal experts say there is general agreement that state courts must defer to the U.S. Supreme Court on matters of federal law.

Yet Justice Tom Parker, who is running for chief justice, argues that state judges should refuse to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedents they believe to be erroneous. Three other GOP candidates in Tuesday’s primary have made nearly identical arguments.

If Parker’s name sounds familiar, you get a gold star—he was formerly Roy Moore’s assistant and spokesman. But he’s not alone when making this particular arguement.

Another candidate, Henry P. “Hank” Fowler, a member of Parker’s staff, said conservative judges must stop surrendering to liberal Supreme Court opinions “without a word of protest.”

I’m sure that plays nicely to the “god and guns” crowd who have convinced themselves that the only way to counter so-called judicial activism is to break down the very components that have made our judicial system work over the last couple of centuries. But if these candidates wind up getting elected and decide to put these threats into practice, then what does the rest of the country do? It would be anarchy.

Furthermore, it’s just another example of the erosion of our very systems of governance, of the checks-and-balances that have worked so well for so long. Now, instead of following established rules of law and tradition, people in power just decide to grab as much of it as they can without worrying about the consequences. You can see it in the Bush Administration’s numerous executive power grabs, from signing statements to massive phone surveillance programs to the unprecedented classification of documents and other information. Now a state Supreme Court stands ready to apply similar “what we say, goes” principles to the delicate balance between state and federal law, and the result could be chaotic to say the least.