Pimping Out Jesus
It's popular to say that Bill Frist's efforts to rig Senate rules and end filibusters on judicial nominees runs counter to the intentions of our Founding Fathers in protecting minority interests. But, truth be told, constitutional experts don't agree on whether the doc's prescription for judicial up-or-down votes actually flies in the face of what James Madison and his cohorts had in mind. After all, it's a Senate rule Frist wants to change, not the Constitution, which says simply that the U.S. Senate is charged with "the advice and consent" on such nominations. Erudite eggheads could, in other words, argue for days on this point (and they are).
From our vantage point, neither Republicans nor Democrats are being intellectually honest about the issue, and both are trying to cloak themselves in the Constitution, not hesitating to play up convenient facts and mislead voters about points that both history and constitutional theory would flatly dispute.
In our view, the blood-curdling facet of this whole political exercise is that religion has been hijacked to advance partisan interests. The most egregious culprit, of course, is the Senate's resident M.D. (master of dogma?), whose only guiding principles, it's becoming increasingly clear, are self-promotion and advancement at any cost.
His participation in the "Justice Sunday" freak show organized by right-wing nut jobs like Albert Mohler Jr.—a Shiite Baptist type who calls the Catholic Church "a false church" that "teaches a false gospel" and who says the "Pope himself holds a false and unbiblical office"—represents the worst kind of religious exploitation. What's more, Frist's servility has done nothing to help reach compromise or resolution on the judicial nominations issue and served only to let evangelicals know that Frist is willing to pimp out Jesus to get conservative activist judges approved.
Mohler, Frist & Co. believe that it's their Christian duty to stack courts with those who consult God before the law. "We have to exercise our Christian citizenship not just at the ballot box but all the way to the nomination and confirmation of judges," Mohler was quoted as saying.
Lest you, dear reader, regard this editorial as somehow left of center, consider that even the leader of Frist's own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), was among a group of religious luminaries last week urging Frist to reconsider his participation in the event, which was to religious culture what raw foodists are to gastronomic culture—that it to say, really, really out there.
What's unfortunate about the religious right's willingness to politicize faith is the inescapable fact that it can sway the court of public opinion in a way the religious left and middle simply cannot. Because they hold both their faith and their constitutional freedom sacred, the thinking faithful are unwilling to compromise one for the other. "We are the most religiously pluralistic country in the world, and we're acting like we're all conservative Christians," Rev. Welton Gaddy, president of the national Interfaith Alliance and a Baptist minister from Louisiana, told the Scene this week. "I think the nation is confused, and I think people confuse the use of religious rhetoric with being religious."
Separate from the religious politicking going on, Frist and the other proponents of procedural nuclear warfare seem to be sudden converts to the idea that all nominees deserve an up-or-down vote by the Senate. The numbers are not in their favor. When Bill Clinton was president, the GOP-controlled Senate from 1994-2000 blocked about 60 of his judicial nominees. Very few of these ever got a full Senate vote, and most didn't even get a vote within the Judiciary Committee. Their confirmation hearings often couldn't even get scheduled. Meanwhile, the Dems are blocking only 10 of more than 200 Bush nominees for the federal bench.
And you don't have to be a partisan to conclude that Clinton's blocked nominees were much closer to the political center than those who have been blocked by the Dems. Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, whose nomination to the 5th Circuit was rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2002, accepted campaign money from companies for which she then ruled. Janice Rogers Brown, another judicial nominee the Dems want to filibuster, is a darling of the "Constitution in Exile" movement. She believes that America was overtaken by socialism in 1937 and wants a totally deregulated society. She has written approvingly of outlawing the minimum wage and has compared "big government" to "slavery" and an "opiate." She makes Clarence Thomas look like a brilliant original thinker, and even our most conservative friends think she's cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
So it takes a special brand of chutzpah for the senator from HCA to claim that the GOP merely wants to defend the best Senate tradition of voting up or down, advising and consenting, against the evil Dems.
Ultimately, though, that's politics. The nature of the beast.
His worst sin is crossing a line that no "people of faith" should tolerate, whether they're labeled as liberal, conservative or moderate. We may disagree with someone from a faith perspective over homosexuality, for example, but we don't have to question that his or her views derive from a sincerely held faith. Frist has allied himself with those who claim that you are not a person of faith unless you agree with them on certain litmus test issues. He has gone beyond failing to represent us; he's labeled us as "anti-Christian" to boot.
It's this blatant and shameless mixing of church and state to accomplish political and procedural victory that would make James Madison roll over in his grave. To compromise one conviction (not that Frist has demonstrated any) for another is like killing your mistress to honor your wife. We imagine that God himself is up there on a fluffy cloud cringing at this whole episode, probably using the U.S. Constitution as a biblical bookmark parked somewhere around Psalm 25, which allows that "integrity and uprightness" protect us.
In which case, God help Bill Frist.
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