Part IV in a Series, BF Editor's Blog: David Sentelle: How One Right-Wing Judge Can be a Wrecking Ball to the Constitution

BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin, Editor and Publisher, BuzzFlash.com

This is my fourth entry on David Sentelle, the Zelig of partisan GOP judges on the federal court.

You can read the third entry by clicking here [0]; the second entry by clicking here [0]; and then following that back to the first entry by clicking here [0].

Through even a cursory examination of the 20-year career of Sentelle on the D.C. Court of Appeals -- and his mysterious role in particularly key decisions regarding Republican administrations -- we can begin to see how the GOP extremists have accomplished their goal of consolidating power by controlling the federal courts, particularly in regards to the crucial D.C. Court of Appeals.

It is vitally important to remember that the D.C. Court of Appeals is not like any other federal court. Because of its location in the nation's capital, it hears the most significant cases relating to governmental powers and the culpability of administration officials.

November 15, 2007

We mentioned in yesterday's installment that we would return to an interview we conducted with Joe Conason, one of our favorite journalists and co-author of the seminal work ("The Hunting of the President") on how the Republicans undermined democracy through their long-term, synchronized effort to smear and impeach Bill Clinton.

In doing so, we are emphasizing, once again, Sentelle's pivotal and political role in using his judicial robes to advance the coordinated strategy, in 1994, to use an "investigation" process to achieve the goal of impeachment, essentially a sanctioned coup.

Remember that this was the same basic Federalist Society crew who used the Supreme Court to steal the election for George W. Bush in 2000. They consider the federal judicial branch of government to be an extension of their effort to achieve unified one-party rule. This is not conjecture; it is borne out by the facts.

So we move onto to our July 25, 2002, interview with Conason [0] to return to the scene of the crime. No impeachment effort would have advanced if David Sentelle had not heeded the bidding of Sentelle's mentor, Jesse Helms, and then U.S. Senator Lauch Faircloth.

The excerpt is a little long, but well worth the effort to read, and it ends on a prescient note:

BuzzFlash: We've talked with Gene Lyons and David Brock, and want to talk with you, about one of the little details that gets lost in the memory of the average person. There are probably only a few hundred people in the U.S. that can recall this, but it's in your book and David Brock's book. We're talking about the moment when former Senator Faircloth of North Carolina and Jesse Helms met with David Sentelle.
What happened? Why was this such a critical moment in the effort to bring down the President? To us, it symbolizes that the right-wing and the Republican Party would stop at nothing to unseat a duly elected president, including using their judiciary pals to try to achieve that effort.
Joe Conason: What happened was very interesting, because it shows how determined the Republicans can be, and how far-sighted they often are when they're protecting their partisan interest. David Sentelle was put in the position to run the Special Division, which is a special court empowered under the Independent Counsel Act to select independent counsels and to oversee their work. Sentelle was a relatively inexperienced federal judge from North Carolina with extreme right-wing views, brought to power by Jesse Helms. He had been a big fundraiser for Ronald Reagan, which was a principal reason why he was appointed to the bench in the first place. Then he was chosen to run the Special Division by William Rehnquist, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Under the guidelines of the Independent Counsel Act, Rehnquist was supposed to select somebody of senior status, a very experienced judge. But the Act did not require him to do that. And David Sentelle was reliably right-wing. That was the only reason that Rehnquist picked Judge Sentelle, and Judge Sentelle proceeded to behave exactly as I think Rehnquist must have expected him to.
But before the Independent Counsel Act was reinstated by Congress and President Clinton, Robert Fiske had been chosen by Janet Reno to serve as the Whitewater special counsel in January 1994.
BuzzFlash: He was a Republican from New York with integrity.
Joe Conason: He was a U.S. Attorney of spotless integrity, one praised by Republicans when he was chosen. Then he functioned for about six months as the special counsel examining Whitewater. Of course, he basically found very little -- if anything -- to prosecute. I think he was going to prosecute Webb Hubbell. Other than that, there was very little for him to do, and he was wrapping it up. He had wrapped up the Foster investigation and had found that Foster committed suicide. But the right-wing decided that they were very unhappy with this Republican prosecutor's results in the Whitewater investigation, and started a campaign in the newspapers to get rid of him, particularly in William Safire's column for the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal editorial columns. There were really vicious attacks on him.
BuzzFlash: So they demanded a special counsel and a special counsel was appointed. But they didn't like the fact that Fiske was about to close up shop and say there's nothing here.
Joe Conason: They didn't like the investigation of somebody they had endorsed, who was from their party, of total integrity -- he had prosecuted Democrats and Republicans as U.S. Attorney. They didn't like the results, so they started a press campaign to get rid of him and get a different prosecutor in there who would get better results -- from their point of view. So what happened? When the Independent Counsel Act was reinstated by Congress in the summer of '94 -- and the President made the mistake of signing it -- Sentelle was suddenly re-empowered. Instead of re-appointing Fiske, he fired Fiske. After meeting with Senators Helms and Faircloth, the two right-wing Republican senators from his home state of North Carolina, Sentelle appointed Ken Starr.
When they were asked about this inappropriate luncheon, the judge and two senators first claimed that all they had talked about was their prostates and cowboy boots. But later, Judge Sentelle admitted under oath that they might have talked a little bit about the independent counsel, though he wasn't sure exactly what had been said. Naturally this was considered an extremely suspicious set of circumstances by anybody who had the faintest powers of observation.
What happened after the meeting with Helms and Faircloth was that David Sentelle picked Ken Starr. This was a very curious choice because Ken Starr had no prosecutorial experience -- none whatsoever. He was an appellate attorney for big corporations. He had been Bush Sr.'s Solicitor General, but he had no experience in criminal prosecution at all. What he did have going for him was that he was a politically reliable, right-wing Republican with a good reputation in the Washington press.
BuzzFlash: And a member of the Federalist Society.
Joe Conason: A leading member and supporter of the Federalist Society, a Bush loyalist, and a very partisan Republican. Not too long before that, Starr had thought of running for the Senate in Virginia as a Republican. He had also recently gotten himself involved in the Paula Jones cases as an informal advisor to Paula Jones' attorneys. Then he was asked to assist Jones by the Independent Women's Forum, which is a Scaife-funded political organization for conservative women. So we went from a professional prosecutor -- probably one of the best in the country -- to a lawyer with no prosecutorial qualifications whatsoever, but a strong partisan who'll behave that way.
BuzzFlash: This symbolizes to BuzzFlash the intersection between the political objectives of the Republican Party and how they use the judiciary. The judiciary nominations are generally below the radar screen of the public and the press. Yet it's been so important to the Bush White House to get their people on the courts. That's because their people, with a wink of an eye, tend to be people that can be relied upon when it comes to decisions that can politically affect the interests of the Republican Party. It seems to BuzzFlash that the David Sentelle appointment of Ken Starr was a pivotal moment. The results consumed the nation for four years, including an impeachment trial -- the judiciary was used to secure someone who was willing to try to entrap the President of the United States and lead to an impeachment trial.
Joe Conason: Well, I think that's right. I think these judicial appointments can't be underestimated. The judiciary is supposed to protect freedoms from corrupt political leaders. The judiciary is supposed to be a bulwark of freedom, and, in this case, it proved to be the opposite of that. The judiciary was used from the very highest judicial position in the land, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, to make political attacks on the opposition or on the duly elected President. This was how the judiciary was misused. It's one of the grossest abuses of judicial authority we've ever seen. And Rehnquist got away with it.
BuzzFlash: How do you reflect upon the 5-4 decision of the Supreme Court to install Bush as President? Particularly that unbelievably frank injunction that Scalia issued to stop the recount, saying the recount might be harmful to the eventual winner of the election, George W. Bush -- that it might damage the reputation of his presidency?
Joe Conason: I think this was the end result of a long series of unchecked abuses by partisan conservative members of the Supreme Court. And we may not have seen the last of it. What's disturbing now is you look at a Court like that and you wonder about challenges to civil liberties -- whether the support will stand up for them or not. I have grave doubts.