February 15, 2011 Dangerous Threats
Representative Denny Rehberg, a Republican and Montana’s House member, boasts that he brings Made-in-Montana solutions to Washington. His latest, proposed last week in a speech advocating states’ rights to the State Legislature, is to put a judge “on the Endangered Species List.”
WERE YOU OR I TO DO SUCH A THING, THE FBI WOULD HAVE US IN CUSTODY IN A NEW YORK MINUTE.
The congressman had in mind Judge Donald Molloy of the Federal District Court for Montana, though he didn’t name him, because of a ruling the judge made reinstating protection of the Endangered Species Act for gray wolves. He did not mean that Judge Molloy should be protected and nurtured, which is the actual purpose of the species law.Mr. Rehberg’s spokesman said: “Denny did not threaten anyone, let alone a federal judge. Nor would he.” But to the judge’s children, writing in protest on Sunday in The Independent Record, a daily newspaper in Helena, Mont., the words made a threat, “either veiled or outright,” and that was “not acceptable.”
Taking Mr. Rehberg’s spokesman at his word, the idea that a judge should be singled out in political retribution because a congressman doesn’t like his rulings is outrageous. As the judge’s children wrote, a judge has “a constitutional responsibility to interpret and apply the laws that Congress enacts, based on the facts and law presented in the courtroom, and not on public opinion.”
Mr. Rehberg, who likes to quote Thomas Jefferson when it suits him, should re-read the Constitution. The judiciary is a separate, co-equal branch of government. Federal judges have life tenure in order to make impartial and independent judgments. Mr. Rehberg should protect the judge from political pressure, not subject him to a nasty kind that encourages others to do the same.
According to the U.S. Marshals Service, threats to federal judges and prosecutors reached 1,394 in the 12 months through last September. In December, the Internet radio host Harold Turner was sentenced to 33 months in prison for threatening three appeals court judges after they upheld a Chicago ban on handguns. On his Web site, Mr. Turner published the judges’ names, photos and phone numbers, along with the address and map of the building where they worked. He declared, “These judges deserve to be killed.”
It is a glory of American life that the law robustly protects the freedom to express political passions. When politics fans those passions rather than disciplining them, as happened last week in Montana where Representative Rehberg’s threat drew an eager laugh, the system protecting that freedom is also threatened.
