c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) It’s a great convenience that judges wear black robes.

For many GOP leaders and right-wing allies, it makes them really stand out as targets.

The most enthusiastic sniper, of course, has been House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who may yet meet judges in their professional capacity. Ever since the entire judicial system, state and federal, refused DeLay’s direct orders on the Terri Schiavo issue, he’s been demanding to know just who judges think they are.

People interpreting the laws?

“I blame Congress over the last 50 to 100 years for not standing up and taking its responsibility given to it by the Constitution,” DeLay told The Washington Times.

“The reason the judiciary has been able to impose a separation of church and state that’s nowhere in the Constitution is that Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had judicial review is because Congress didn’t stop them. The reason we had a right to privacy is because Congress didn’t stop them …

“We’re having to change a whole culture in this _ a culture created by law schools,” said DeLay, by trade an insect exterminator.

Now, no more Mr. Nice Guy. DeLay has instructed the House Judiciary Committee to see what the House can do about judges who act like judges.

“We set up the courts,” he said last week. “We can unset the courts.”

And lots of DeLay’s allies are eager to help him do it.

When Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy recently visited Capitol Hill to testify on the court’s budget, Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., lectured him that “Lately we’ve had rulings that seem to go beyond the rule of law” and the court was “not interpreting the Constitution and laws that govern America anymore.”

Rep. Todd Akin, R-Mo., suggested last fall that the simplest answer would be for the president to ignore the rulings he doesn’t like _ apparently figuring that George W. Bush will be president forever. Two Republican senators, Richard Shelby of Alabama and Sam Brownback of Kansas, have a simple plan to fix part of the problem _ the Constitutional Restoration Act, which would ban federal courts from ruling on anything involving God.

It might be a touchy question how that applies to environmental issues.

The onslaught has been relentless. At a D.C. conference on Confronting the Judicial War on Faith _ DeLay spoke by video _ Michael Schwartz, chief of staff to Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., declared that as long as there was judicial review, “It is a sick and sad joke to claim we have a Constitution.” Going straight to the heart of things, Alan Keyes, former presidential candidate and Senate nominee, declared, “I believe that in our country today the judiciary is the focus of evil.”

James C. Dobson, head of Focus on the Family and a rising Republican power broker, recently compared “men in white robes, the Ku Klux Klan,” to “the black-robed men” on the Supreme Court.

Those robes do make great targets, and presumably Dobson meant to include the two black-robed women.

And the Family Research Council’s view of the courts is beckoning to the GOP leadership. This weekend, the council is holding “Justice Sunday,” a telecast arguing that Democratic opposition to a few of the president’s judicial nominees amounts to bigotry “against people of faith” _ by which the Family Research Council means, of course, itself. But the group’s head, Tony Perkins, has problems with judges that go much deeper than the filibuster: “For years, activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the ACLU, have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms.”

Even if most federal judges, and seven Supreme Court justices, have been named by Republican presidents.

Speaking on the telecast will be Bill Frist, R-Tenn., Senate majority leader and prominent 2008 presidential hopeful. Frist insists that speaking to the group doesn’t mean he endorses its language, but he clearly hears it.

The role of both congressional majority leaders shows that the current argument isn’t just about whether the Senate will be a rubber stamp, but whether judges will be.

This argument features people ready to level the judiciary and wage religious war for political advantage.

The robes are a target no matter who wears them.

MO/PH/JL END SARASOHN

(David Sarasohn is an associate editor at The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)