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Monday, January 01, 2007

Cackles from the Balcony: Original Intent Edition

I have long worried that the most lasting legacy of the marauding mercenaries of the era of Killer Clown Republicanism will be their generational debasement of the Courts. Recent comments by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. have reminded me why the Repug movement is just as likely to simply eat itself or unceremoniously leave the public building the moment the sweet pickings get the least bit harder to come by. According to an article in the New York Times today, Roberts “made judicial pay the sole topic of his second annual report, issued on Sunday, declaring that the failure by Congress to raise federal judges’ salaries in recent years has become a ‘constitutional crisis’ that puts the future of the federal courts in jeopardy.”

One wishes he had responded as forcefully to the intimations of Constitutional crisis to be discerned by unprovoked war, executive signing statements, unwarranted wire taps, or the flushing of habeas corpus, but one readily understands that a “Mean Generation” Republican will have other priorities: Roberts “noted that judges had fallen well behind the American labor force as a whole in keeping up with inflation over the past 25 years, with judges’ pay having declined by 23.9 percent since 1969, adjusted for inflation, while the national average for all wages rose by 17.8 percent.”

Who could blame the anointed Royalists from expressing their exasperation at making $175,000 a year (Roberts himself makes $212,000 a year with little but the title “Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States” to console him for his sacrifice), considering the high cost of all the craptacular McMansions and Vegas vomitoria vacations and chewable hooker-feet such elite folks are surely otherwise entitled to?

By all means, let me encourage all the theocrats and economic Royalists who have plagued us from Reagan through Bush to get the hell out of the public service they so palpably despise and move on to the millionaire lecture circuits and advisory boards and corporate-militarist Chairmanships that better befit their brutality. Be careful, though, boys, not to give too full vent to your book-cooking fraud-spinning conflict-of-interest indulging Republican ids once you leave your unloved underpaid Government posts, or you may find yourselves where so many of you have long belonged: behind bars.

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