Wednesday, March 02, 2005
THAT "CLOAK OF LEGALITY"
The Associated Press:
CLARIFICATION: By confirmation of judicial appointees, I did indeed mean in the context of the cloture vote, which can force an end to a filibuster. ¶ by Robert, Wednesday, March 02, 2005
The Associated Press:
Senate Republicans are game to see several of President Bush's judicial nominees confirmed for the bench but Democrats oppose many of them. On Tuesday, Sen. Robert Byrd compared Republican tactics on nominees to Adolph Hitler's use of power in Nazi Germany. . .Perhaps this is one example of the "legality" to which the august (and really old) senator refers:
. . . "Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality. He recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side," he said. . .
. . . As for Ernst Röhm - on Hitler's order he had been given a pistol containing a single bullet to commit suicide, but refused to do it, saying "If I am to be killed let Adolf do it himself." Two SS officers, one of whom was Theodore Eicke, commander of the Totenkopf (Death's Head) guards at Dachau, entered Röhm's cell after waiting fifteen minutes and shot him point blank. Reportedly, Röhm's last words were "Mein Führer, mein Führer!"Oh, and as for the "never" having "abandoned the cloak"? Even Hitler himself never said that:
On Sunday evening, July 1, while some of the shooting was still going on, Hitler gave a tea party in the garden of the Chancellery for cabinet members and their families to give the appearance things were getting back to normal.
By 4 a.m., Monday, July 2, the bloody purge had ended. The exact number of murders is unknown since all Gestapo documents relating to the purge were destroyed. Estimates vary widely from 200 or 250, to as high as 1,000 or more. Less than half of those murdered were actually SA officers. . .
. . . On July 13, Hitler gave a long speech to the Nazi controlled Reichstag (Parliament) in which he announced seventy four had been shot and justified the murders.Hmmm. Looking to lower the required threshold for the U.S. Senate's confirmation of judicial appointees from a sixty vote "super"-majority to a simple majority. Whether one agrees or not, yep, the similarity between such a change and Nazi "law" is stunningly obvious.
"If anyone reproaches me and asks why I did not resort to the regular courts of justice, then all I can say is this: In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I became the supreme judge of the German people.". . .
CLARIFICATION: By confirmation of judicial appointees, I did indeed mean in the context of the cloture vote, which can force an end to a filibuster. ¶ by Robert, Wednesday, March 02, 2005
