Newt Gingrich’s Statist America

Newt Gingrich, who just like at least 100 million other innocent Americans, candidly admitted once that he smoked marijuana while in college, now (unless he’s changed his mind in the last 15 years) believes in the death penalty for marijuana offenders.

That’s right. Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newton Gingrich, in a serious attempt to position himself to the political right of Attila the Hun during the mid 1990’s, introduced H.R. 4170: the “Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996.” Under this draconian proposed law a mandatory death penalty would have applied to anyone convicted more than once of importing two ounces or more of marijuana or other controlled substance across the U.S. border.

“If you import a commercial quantity of illegal drugs, it is because you have made the personal decision that you are prepared to get rich by destroying our children,” he explained at a 1995 fundraiser. “I have made the decision that I love our children enough that we will kill you if you do this.”Gingrich went on to suggest that a few mass executions of people convicted under such a law might prove an effective deterrent.

About his own marijuana possession and smoking days, Gingrich explained: “That was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era.” “See, when I smoked pot it was illegal, but not immoral.” “Now, it is illegal AND immoral. The law didn’t change, only the morality… That’s why you get to go to jail and I don’t,” he told a reporter in 1996.

Just last week, Gingrich declared that if he had his way all post conception birth control methods would be illegal in the United States of America.

He supports a federal “fetal personhood” constitutional amendment, and formally signed the Personhood USA group pledge which proclaims “unalienable personhood for every American from the moment of conception until natural death," pledging also that he would “endorse legislation to make clear the 14th Amendment protections apply to unborn children ... without exception and without compromise.”

If elected president, he pledged further to “only appoint federal judges and relevant officials who will uphold and enforce state and federal laws recognizing that all human beings at every stage of development are persons with the unalienable right to life.” 

Never mind that such loony statist and religious ideas have now failed to pass with voters in Mississippi, the heart of the American Bible belt, and every other state where they have been on the ballot; Newt Gingrich is concerned only with dishing out red meat to his religious ultra-right-wing social conservative base in an effort to secure an Iowa caucuses victory and ultimately the Republican Party nomination so he can lose the 2012 general election to Barack Obama.

Then during the recent Iowa debate, in what I can only describe as a spectacular proclamation of un-Americanism bordering on an outright personal declaration of treason against the Democratic Constitutional Republic of the United States, Gingrich stated that if elected president he would work to abolish federal judges if he didn’t agree with what he called their “anti-American” or “dictatorial” rulings.”

“It alters the balance because the courts have become grotesquely dictatorial, far too powerful,” Gingrich opined. “I’ve been working on this project since 2002 when the Ninth Circuit court said that ‘one nation under God’ is unconstitutional in the Pledge of Allegiance. And I decided that if you had judges that were so radically anti-American that they thought ‘one nation under God’ was wrong, they shouldn’t be on the court.”

Apparently, Newt’s insistence on the incredibly trivial point of maintaining his Government God in the Pledge of Allegiance is more important to him than upholding the fundamental constitutional integrity of the three separate branches of government and the corresponding checks and balances so arduously conceived and implemented by the founding fathers of this nation.

"There is steady encroachment of secularism through the courts to redefine America as nonreligious … which is enormously dangerous," Gingrich said on CBS's Face the Nation.

I have a news-flash for the former speaker: America IS and always has been a secular nation; the government IS non-religious, and all of it was designed that way on purpose. He’s the one who wants to redefine America – as a Christian theocracy.

He’s obviously far more concerned that judges support his religion than he is with judges following the provisions of the Constitution and the law. "An overwhelming majority of Americans are going to say when a judge is aggressively anti-American, aggressively anti-free speech, and aggressively anti-religious -- that judge ought to not be on the bench," Gingrich told reporters later.

Anti-American; who is anti-American in this picture? If Newt Gingrich doesn’t agree with the Supreme Court, he’ll abolish it, and he thinks that’s American.

Newt Gingrich actually believes that if a few dissatisfied members in Congress don’t agree with this or that legal ruling, they should have the power to subpoena judges to come before them to “explain” and be reprimanded for their court decisions -- an outrageous, unconstitutional and totally unprecedented crackpot idea.

Doesn’t he know that judges always explain the legal reasoning and precedent for their decisions in written published opinions? Just read the opinion, Newt, and you’ll get your explanation. I’ll bet he’s never read a legal opinion in his life. If a litigant doesn’t like it, they can appeal.

Former staunchly conservative attorney generals under President George W. Bush, Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales, told Fox News that they were alarmed by Gingrich's argument that Congress should be allowed to subpoena judges after controversial rulings to "explain their constitutional reasoning."

"I think we have a great government, a great country because it's built upon the foundation of the rule of law. And one of the things that makes it great and the rule of law is protected by having a strong independent judiciary," said Gonzales.

I never much liked Mr. Gonzales; and I don’t believe we have such a great government anymore; but if anything is still good about it, it’s the separation of powers mandate in the Constitution.

Judges in America shouldn’t be reduced to the status of rank politicians. Judges in America shouldn’t be so easily subjected to intimidation and bullying by the ragged political mob. True justice is only possible when judges are independent of politics and bound only by the constraints of the law.

Newt Gingrich should know better.