New meme to watch for

"Judicial Tyranny" seems to be the phrase that the far right yells every time a judge hands down a ruling that they don't like. When GW Bush signed the law banning partial birth abortions, and a judge in Nebraska issued a limited temporary injunction, the far right started yelling "judicial tyranny!". When Judge Moore was compelled to move the Ten Commandments monument....judicial tyranny! When the Massachusetts supreme court "undermined traditional marriage"...JUDICIAL TYRANNY! When the phrase "...under god" was removed from the pledge of allegience..well, you get the picture.

When searching google for this term, it is interesting to see the domains associated with this phrase: renewamerica.com, family.org, traditionalvalues.org, reclaimamerica.org, dutyisours.com, christianity.com, heartland.org. If one makes a snap judgement about who owns these domains, it is clear that the far right is frequently using this term to describe what is going on inside the borders of the U.S. I would not hesitate to think that if Hitler were running for office today, and promised these "freedoms" in his campaign, that the right would be falling over themselves to get that guy in office (come to think of it, they never did find Hitler's body...). As a sidenote, presidential tyranny almost never shows up in google, and certainly not in reference to Bush.

Possibly the earliest this phrase was used in American History was when Patrick Henry (1736-1799), a member of the Continental Congress said:

"Power is the great evil with which we are contending. We have divided power between three branches of government and erected checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. However, where is the check on the power of the judiciary? If we fail to check the power of the judiciary, I predict that we will eventually live under judicial tyranny."

In a time where we are living under the rule of the worst president in U.S. history, whose legacy will be the erosion of civil liberties, I would like to advance another common phrase to describe what is occuring within our judicial system: damage control. The American public is staring down possibility of not just four but eight years of presidential ineptitude, and with congress controlled by the Republicans, the only branch which appears out of step (to the right) is the judicial branch. The only thing keeping us from having to wear name badges around our neck all day, and keeping our forces out of Iran and Syria, is not GW's fully developed sense of right and wrong unfortunately; it is (at this point) the judicial system. A few millenia from now, when "The Rise and Fall of the American Empire" (a more complete and well documented version of its Roman cousin) is standard reading, the American judicial system will be credited with stemming the tide of imperialism, and maintaining liberty in the "homeland". Liberals at this point were left standing around chanting a different Patrick Henry quote:

"...give me liberty, or give me death !"