Quote of the week
[T]he moral point of the matter is never reached by calling what happened by the name of ‘genocide’ or by counting the many millions of victims: extermination of whole peoples had happened before in antiquity, as well as in modern colonization. It is reached only when we realize this happened within the frame of a legal order and that the cornerstone of this ‘new law’ consisted of the command ‘Thou shall kill,’ not thy enemy but innocent people who were not even potentially dangerous, and not for any reason of necessity but, on the contrary, even against all military and other utilitarian calculations. … And these deeds were not committed by outlaws, monsters, or raving sadists, but by the most respected members of respectable society.
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on The Banality of Evil
All over America, GOP-led legislatures are pushing to impeachstate judges. Lawmakers in Iowa, Massachusetts, Missouri, Oklahoma, New Jersey and Pennsylvania have moved in on the judicial branch, the most infamous of these crusades being the effort in Iowa to oust those state supreme court judges who voted in favor of same-sex marriage. Evidently that is still a “high crime or misdemeanor” to some. It’s one thing for politicians to seek out impeachment proceedings that are sui generis. But now legislators are including specific impeachment language in the text of their statutes. In Arizona, New Hampshire and Virginia, rump Republican lawmakers this year introduced bills making it an impeachable offense for judges to make rulings on FOIA requests or to merely cite international law. There’s a legal term-of-art for such efforts: it’s called “bat-shit crazy.” – Andrew Cohen in The Atlantic
