Gingrich might dispatch US Marshals after judges

ATLANTA (AP) — Newt Gingrich continues to level harsh attacks on the judicial branch, saying as president he would consider dispatching U.S. marshals to force judges to appear before Congress to explain controversial decisions.

Gingrich made the comments Sunday in an interview on CBS' "Face the Nation."

As he courts conservatives, the former House speaker has stepped up his attacks on the judicial system in recent days as the Iowa caucuses near. Gingrich helped fund an effort last year to oust three Iowa judges who upheld a law permitting gay marriage in the state.

Gingrich said Sunday that he is disturbed by the "steady encroachment of secularism through the courts to redefine America as a nonreligious country and the encroachment of the courts on the president's commander-in-chief powers which is enormously dangerous."[1]



Gingrich, with his penchant for citing history, told reporters Saturday that there is plenty of precedent to support his idea, going all the way back to Thomas Jefferson, who, as president in 1802, led the abolition of three federal circuits and 16 judgeships that had been created — and filled — by his political foes before he and his party took power.

“It’s clearly constitutional, and Jefferson did it,” Gingrich said. “. . . I raise that issue not because it’s necessarily something that we would do but to indicate to the justices that there are clearly powers that historically have been used.”

Asked whether such an act would provoke a constitutional crisis, Gingrich replied: “Actually, the courts are forcing us to a constitutional crisis because of their arrogance and overreach. The courts have been trying to impose an elitist value system on a country that is inherently not elitist.”

Gingrich’s critics say that it is one thing to abolish newly created courts and not replace them, as Jefferson did 200 years ago, but that it is another to remove judges and then replace them because of specific judicial decisions.

Michael W. McConnell, director of theConstitutional Law Center at Stanford University and a former federal appeals judge appointed by Bush, also observed that conservative audiences “should not be cheering” and “are misled” if they believe Gingrich’s proposal is in their interest at a time when Republicans are looking to the Supreme Court to declare President Obama’s health-care law unconstitutional.

“You would think that this would be a time when they would be defending the independence of the judiciary, not attacking it,” he said. “You can’t have it both ways. It can’t be that when conservative Republicans object to the courts, they have the right to replace judges, and when liberal Democrats disapprove of the courts, they don’t. And the constitution is pretty clear that neither side can eliminate judges because they disagree with their decisions.”[2]