More Schiavo fallout.

I don’t have anything new to add to this—outrage among commentators is far-flung—but in any case, John Cornyn followed up Tom Delay’s veiled threats of retribution against the 11? federal and state court judges who ruled against the Schindlers in the Schiavo matter with this comment:

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country. Certainly nothing new, but we seem to have run through a spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the news and I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters on some occasions where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in - engage in violence."

Now this isn’t exactly a call to violence, so in that respect, Cornyn isn’t more of an idiot than Delay. But it does strike me as a particularly insensitive view and could not have been anything but calculated. I’ll cut Delay some slack because I think he’s genuinely stupid. In his past life, he was an exterminator (think Dale, from King of the Hill). Cornyn, on the other hand, is a ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a former federal district court judge. How Cornyn could have gotten so far in life without a rudimentary understanding of the separation of powers is incomprehensible. Cornyn is no Delay. I doubt that he slept through con law in law school, so he understands the principle. The truth of the matter is more damning—Cornyn said something that he understood to be indefensibly wrong, but said it anyway for political gain. That’s a novel approach.