I
am no fan of Newt Gingrich. I think he is arrogant, ambitious, reckless,
solipsistic, and utterly devoid of a moral center. I do not, however, believe
that he is stupid. Nor do I consider him insane. Why, then, has he taken one of
the stupidest, craziest public positions of any serious presidential candidate in recent history?
I refer, of course to his statement in
last week’s debate that sitting judges should be hauled before Congress to justify their legal opinions, his follow-up opinion that the president and congress should be free to ignore
court decisions that they don’t like, and yesterday’s promise that he would
send Federal
officials—U.S. Capital Police or U.S. Marshals—to arrest
members of the judiciary whose opinions he disagreed with.
Gingrich’s attack on the federal judiciary is so
far out of the mainstream that it was labeled “outrageous” by Ann
Coulter and “frightening” by Bill
O’Reilly. Let me say that again: Ann Coulter called Newt Gingrich outrageous. Could this possibly get weirder?
So what’s up? Is a former speaker of the house with
a doctorate in history from an actual college really suggesting that America start arresting judges for exercising their
judgment? Would he really be willing to risk the biggest Constitutional crisis
since the Civil War in order to protect the “right” of religious Texans to say
a meaningless, non-denominational prayer once a year at graduation ceremonies?
Could he possibly be that stupid or that crazy?
I don't think so. That Gingrich has turned to such
rhetoric, I think, tells us a lot about how he views his position in the
Republican field. He has a large lead now, but it is the
same large lead once held by Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and Donald Trump—and this is simply the result of a cause in search of a rebel. To beat the better-funded, better-organized, and more-respected Mitt
Romney for real, he absolutely has to consolidate this 35% or so of the Republican
electorate behind him. And many of these voters really are crazy.
One of the things that they are the craziest about is
the Supreme Court. A brief tour through the la-la land of far-right
Constitutional history—via books such as Mark Levin’s Men in Black: How the
Supreme Court is Destroying America (2006) and Andrew Napolitano’s The
Constitution in Exile (2007)—can show us exactly what the people who
control Gingrich’s fate have been taught to believe. They think that
· the Supreme
Court seized the power of judicial review in a “counter-revolution” led by
Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, making every subsequent judgment on a
law’s constitutionality an illegal act on the court’s part.
· the Supreme
Court has no legitimate power over state laws at all, only over conflicts
between states or between the states and the federal government.
·
the court has
used the “commerce clause” of Article I to invade—intentionally and with malice
aforethought—the civil liberties of all Americans.
·
the entire
federal judiciary is made up of atheists who hate God and religion and have
eliminated any trace of religion in the public square.
· since the days
of Franklin Roosevelt, the Supreme Court has been the declared enemy of the
American way of life and is now the most powerful of the three branches of
government.
I am not making this stuff up. A substantial
portion of the extreme right believes everything on this list (responding to
the historical and Constitutional flaws in these books constitutes the
penultimate chapter of my forthcoming book That’s Not What They Said!). And while I strongly suspect that these
are not the voters that Gingrich would like to be courting right now, they happen to be the only niche not currently being filled by a more attractive, less historically adulterous candidate.
To understand why Newt Gingrich, who is not an
idiot, is sounding so much like an idiot, we have to consider the race that he
is running right now. He is not yet positioned to run against Barack Obama, or
even against Mitt Romney. Those are later games in the series. Right now, he
has to finish off Michelle Bachman, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, and Rick Santorum to
become the only viable “Not Mitt Romney” in the race.
And in that particular four-way contest, there is simply no such thing as too much crazy.
