Daniel Andrews completed the Pike's Peak Marathon on Aug. 16. The Denver Police corporal, seen here on the summit, halfway through the race, bettered John's time in the same event 34 years ago.[photopress:daniel_pikes_peak_081609_cropped.jpg,thumb,pp_image]
Courts Out of Control
Nagel Diagnoses the Unrestrained Judiciary “If the root cause of judicial excess is the way lawyers think, what is to be done?” So asked CU law professor Robert Nagel in an important article four years ago, with insights even more timely as we anticipate the seating of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “It is necessary,” Nagel answers, “to look for those lawyers who are confident enough and independent enough to challenge established patterns of thought and deeply ingrained instincts. And it is necessary to recognize that the nomination and confirmation processes may even then not be fully adequate to restrain the Court. Renewed attention needs to be directed at other political checks on the federal judiciary. [But] Congress so far has lacked the political will….”
From this important and seldom-voiced insight has grown Bob Nagel's new book, Unrestrained: Judicial Excess and the Mind of the American Lawyer. We at Backbone America regard his diagnosis as fundamentally important for any hope of meaningful judicial reform, not only at the federal level when (as they will eventually) conservatives regain power, but also in Colorado for the immediate present, when voters have a chance to dismiss four activist liberal justices from the state Supreme Court in 2010.
Here is the full text of Nagel's seminal article from the long-ago days of the confirmation drama surrounding Miers, Alito, and Roberts.
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The Problem with the Court National Review, Nov. 21, 2005 By Robert F. Nagel Rothgerber Professor of Constitutional Law University of Colorado School of Law
Observers across the political spectrum see the next nomination to the Supreme Court as pivotal. With the withdrawal of Harriet Miers as a potential successor to the meandering Sandra Day O’Connor, President Bush has the opportunity to force a clear-cut decision on whether the Court should make a basic change of direction. As the upcoming confirmation battle takes shape, it is important to understand fully the distressing lessons of the past thirty-five years. By 1972 President Nixon had placed Justices Burger, Blackmun, and Rehnquist on the high court. He did so after making the judicial activism of the Warren Court a major campaign issue. Since then, Republican presidents have successfully nominated seven individuals, all for the announced purpose of reducing the amount of legislating from the bench. Even President Clinton’s two appointments, Stephen Bryer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, were presented as moderates who would refrain from extreme forms of judicial adventurism. In short, for roughly thirty-five years Republican appointees have had numerical domination of the Supreme Court and, more importantly, during that period the American people have witnessed a continuous record of assurances from presidents and judicial nominees that the Court should apply, not make, law. While it is widely recognized that these assurances have not exactly been translated into action, it is difficult to grasp the full scope of the failure. The problem begins with the fact that neither the Burger Court nor the Rehnquist Court reversed even one of the Warren Court’s egregiously activist decisions establishing new individual rights. In fact, not long ago Chief Justice Rehnquist himself wrote a decision emphatically re-affirming the notorious rule of Miranda v. Arizona requiring that police inform criminal suspects about their right to remain silent before questioning them. The conservative instinct to respect precedent might be thought to explain this sustained refusal to reverse course, but it cannot explain why so many Warren Court rulings have been recklessly expanded. It cannot explain, for example, the rather complete transformation by the Burger Court of a principle against legally-enforced segregation into a demand that school districts achieve racial balance through extensive busing programs. Nor can it explain the Rehnquist Court’s expansion of earlier, limited rulings on separation of church and state into an aggressive campaign to stop government endorsement of religion, including non-denominational prayers at school graduations, student-led prayers at football games, and public displays of the Ten Commandments. Even this is only the tip of the iceberg. Since 1970 the Court has established new rights undreamed of during the Warren Court era. Everyone knows of a few outrageous examples, such as Roe v. Wade, the abortion decision. But the record does not end there. The original abortion decision, which was itself roundly condemned by legal scholars as having no legal justification, has been stubbornly extended to grant the right to minors and to protect even partial birth abortions. Indeed, in voting to re-affirm Roe, three Republican appointees, O’Connor, Kennedy, and Souter, made the most extreme claims for judicial power ever articulated in American history. Moreover, the record of activism is not confined to a limited set of highly visible issues. It extends to every corner of public life. It includes an extensive campaign to transform gender roles, as well as significant efforts to re-write defamation laws in all fifty states, to protect pornography and nude dancing and offensive language, to require free public education of the children of illegal aliens, and to normalize homosexuality. In a mostly forgotten foray, the Court even adopted Charles Reich’s theories about “the greening of American” to announce that public assistance is a property right and that sixth grade school children must be given a hearing before being suspended. The result has been far-reaching and destructive changes to public administration and educational discipline. It is, then, an understatement to say that thirty-five years of appointing justices for the announced purpose of reining in the Court has not worked. The most common explanation for this sorry state of affairs is, of course, the Souter Explanation, which notes that, when he was nominated, David Souter had almost no public record on any important issue and that he has turned out to be one of the most liberals members of the Court. Under this view, which had much to do with opposition to the Miers nomination, it is assumed that predictions about judicial behavior can become more accurate if there is enough information. There is, of course, some truth in the Souter Explanation, but it does not fully explain our inability to restrain the Court. One reason is that even people who did have extensive public records before their nomination—people like ex-Governor Earl Warren and ex-politician and judge Sandra Day O’Connor—sometimes turn out much differently than their records would predict. This leads to the Kennedy Explanation, which posits that nominees’ beliefs change radically once they are on the Court. Much of the pressure to change is thought to be social. The justices, it is said, live the Washington D.C. in close proximity to people who think the purpose of life is to exercise political power over others. They begin to read the Washington Post and they socialize with liberal law professors from places like Harvard. Or, as in the case of Justice Kennedy (who is especially fond of relying on foreign legal sources when interpreting the American Constitution), they attend international judicial conferences where the prevailing belief is that judges are the ultimate guardians of civilized values everywhere. Again, this explanation is surely partly true. But most justices were powerful appellate lawyers or ambitious executive branch officials before ascending to the Court. You would think, then, that many of the factors that are supposed to influence them after confirmation would have already influenced them before that and should have been detectable during the nomination and confirmation processes. A third, and fuller, explanation is so obvious that it is generally ignored. Those put on the Supreme Court are almost always successful lawyers. This means that they tend to be adept at—and therefore not inclined to be skeptical of—the way lawyers and judges think. And the way that lawyers and judges think is one of the basic reasons that we have such a powerful judiciary. Consider first the basic legal instinct to respect and follow the logic of prior cases. The consequences of this instinct are almost always underestimated. In fact, firmly entrenched lines of cases now establish the basically liberal direction of the Court, not in only in a few high profile cases, but across the board. It is now settled precedent that government cannot endorse religion, that a right to privacy is part of the Constitution (and that this right applies to an open-ended array of issues involving sexuality and family life), that pornography is protected by freedom of speech, and that equal protection requires the invalidation of any legislative distinction thought by judges to be irrational. Even reversal of one or two landmark cases, like Roe v. Wade, would not significantly alter the fundamentally interventionist jurisprudence of the Court. More generally, many lines of cases hold that courts must decide whether an interest asserted by the government to justify a statute is illegitimate or, if legitimate, how important it is. These same legal doctrines also require that judges decide whether the legislature has chosen the best or most effective way of achieving that interest. This is to say that it is now normal and required practice for judges to make essentially the same kinds of assessments about the wisdom and efficacy of legislation as legislators do. It is easy to say at a confirmation hearing that judges should not legislate from the bench, but dozens of authoritative cases require that they do. Indeed, the line between a legal and a political judgment is now obscured to the vanishing point. Respect for precedent is only one aspect of a broader inclination in the legal profession to honor authority generally and the judiciary especially. This inclination has natural appeal, especially for conservatives, but it has been taken so far in the nation’s law schools that the Supreme Court is commonly depicted as an indispensable political and moral leader. Its role in cases like Brown v. Board of Education was nothing less than to save the country from
profound moral paralysis; its role in cases involving Nixon’s Watergate tapes or the 2000 Florida election dispute, was to save the political system from chaos and fecklessness. It was this same grand view of the centrality of judicial power that caused those three conservative justices in Planned Parenthood v. Casey to write that opposition to the Court’s original abortion decision threatens the American constitutional system. At its best and highest levels, the practice of law involves the imposition of order on complex factual disputes and the marshalling of rational arguments. It is a profession that honors detachment, discipline, intellect, and, above all, words. As valuable as these traits can be, those who are trained to rely on them in their daily work can easily become distrustful or even disdainful of the political process because that process involves unruly conflict, raw power, and emotionality. In politics the strongest arguments do not always prevail, and words are sometimes less important than experience; failure, disorder, and even disaster are always possibilities. Judges, who occupy an even more controlled environment than do practicing lawyers, will often view the outcomes of the political process as irrational, unjustifiable, or excessively risky. Finally, it now accepted by the bulk of the legal profession, including many of its most influential scholars and successful practitioners, that there is no single correct method for interpreting the Constitution. As (now) Chief Justice John Roberts said at his confirmation hearings, the correct sources of constitutional meaning vary depending on the nature of the case. Sometimes a justice should look at the plain meaning of the text, but sometimes that can be overridden by historical information or by the overall logic of the document or by changes in social conditions or by evolving political practices or by philosophical considerations. This is what most sophisticated lawyers believe, and it is the way they shape their arguments. This variety of interpretive methods may sound reasonable, but in operation it means that judges are free to move from one method or combination of methods to another. This in turn means that the justices are free in a very real sense to give whatever meaning they wish to the Constitution. If the literal meaning of the text seems unfortunate in a particular case, it is permissible to shift to some other source of meaning until the result seems acceptable. A justice committed to widely accepted understandings about what it is to engage in interpretation, then, is committed to a method that permits the justice’s preferences to displace constitutional meaning. This is not left-wing excess; it is mainstream legal thinking. If the root cause of judicial excess is the way lawyers think, what is to be done? Certainly, it is necessary to continue to study the records of judicial nominees carefully. But accurate predictions about specific positions that a nominee will take once on the Court, even if they are possible, will not change the basic direction of the Court. To do this it is necessary to look for those lawyers who are confident enough and independent enough to challenge established patterns of thought and deeply ingrained instincts. Both Justices Thomas and Scalia demonstrate these capacities, so such lawyers exist. But to find them it is necessary to look beyond credentials and ideology. And it is necessary to recognize that the nomination and confirmation processes may even then not be fully adequate to restrain the Court. In this event, renewed attention needs to be directed at other political checks on the federal judiciary. Congress so far has lacked the political will to enact jurisdiction-stripping legislation or to reverse egregious judicial errors through constitutional amendment. This failure means that for some thirty-five years, at any rate, we Americans have been more interested in the melodrama of confirmation hearings than in real change.
Petitions defend TABOR
Taxpayers fight back With Colorado's governor, legislature, and Supreme Court actively colluding to gut or repeal the Taxpayer's Bill of Rights, just when California's fiscal collapse dramatizes the need for TABOR, citizens are circulating three petitions to fight back. We featured them July 5 on Backbone Radio. Here are the web links where you can find out how to sign the petitions, or carry them for your neighbors to sign, so voters will have a chance to defend TABOR on the 2010 ballot.
Sticker shock on this year's sharp increase in vehicle registration "fees" (arguably a tax by another name, and as such, subject to a vote of the people) made headlines just before Independence Day. One of the petitions would cut vehicle taxes (and fees), income taxes, and phone taxes. Get details at www.COtaxreform.com.
Another of the petitions locks the door tighter (since politicians keep finding ways around the existing ban) against credit card government in Colorado. Get details at www.LimitCOdebt.com.
The third of these companion proposals, each needing over 100,000 signatures by this fall, in order to make the ballot next fall, addresses the upward trend of property taxes, for which TABOR's protection has also proved inadequate. Details on that one are at www.LimitPropertyTax.com.
'No Rest Elsewhere' relives Vietnam combat in 1968
Book Review by John Andrews [photopress:orcutt__cover.jpg,thumb,pp_image]
I'm honored to help an old friend, Allen Orcutt, bring out a little book of poems, prose, and pictures that explores how a year at war can change a man for life. And much for the better in this Marine pilot's case, searing as the ordeal was. No Rest Elsewhere: Vietnam Notes, 1968-2008, expands on a poetic collection initially published in 1973, just after Allen came home. It includes his account of reconciling war-shattered relationships in later years, climaxing with a trip back to Vietnam in 2007. You can order the book for $12.50 per copy, postpaid, by sending your check to Allen Orcutt at 737 Storm King Circle, New Castle CO 81647. Or email him at aorcutt@sopris.net, providing your postal address to which book(s) and invoice can be sent.
Below are the Table of Contents for "No Rest Elsewhere," the author's introduction, and my foreword. If you or a friend or family member served in Vietnam or any of America's wars, or if you just enjoy honest, thoughtful writing about life's deepest issues, I encourage you to get this book.
------------------------------------ NO REST ELSEWHERE Vietnam Notes, 1968-2008 By Allen Orcutt Introduction by the Author
My father and both of my grandfathers served their country during world War I and War II . Their portraits in Army and Marine Corps uniforms of the day hang on the wall behind my desk. Although they were awarded several medals including silver and bronze stars, not one of them shared their experiences.
I know that Allen Wood Orcutt, my father’s father, served proudly in WW I. However, all we have of his experiences were love letters sent to my grandmother. He died at age 35 from complications of a virus and mustard gas.
During that same war, my other grandfather, Harvey S. Brown , was a runner-messenger with the Marines in the trench warfare of Belleau Wood., France. He, among very few, survived that assignment. Yet, he never spoke of his experiences.
My Dad, George H Orcutt, served in War II as a Scout with General Patton in France. Although he was highly decorated, his sense of duty made the bullet in his shoulder put there by a German sniper, a reminder to me that in combat, war’s rules and war’s memories remain deep within.
Before l departed for Vietnam, my friend and former WW II South Pacific Marine , David Rennie shared with me this message. He discovered it in a castle in Scotland. In Europe and Great Britain he saw plenty of armor mostly under glass and in pristine condition. There was one exception. It was of modest design with battle dents and heavy damage. On its breastplate was inscribed in Latin, “Nulla Quiat Alibi”. That is “No Rest Elsewhere” than to uphold the honor, camaraderie and trust shared by fellow warriors, in this case Marine Corps pilots.
For us there was No Rest Elsewhere when I began Officer Candidate School in Quantico, Virginia, in 1966, started flight school in Pensacola in 1967, or arrived in Vietnam in 1968, the twelve months after TET proved to be the worst for helicopters, pilots and air crews.
What you are about to read is not just my story. Rather, it’s a story about young men, the warrior elite, in war. It is also about their family and friends. Some who stood beside them, some who didn’t.
------------------------------------ NO REST ELSEWHERE Vietnam Notes, 1968-2008 By Allen Orcutt Table of Contents
Part One: In Country
1. Old-Fashioned War Poem 2. Strike 3. Fogged In 4. Strike Two 5. September 29, 1968 6. Zone Supposedly Secure 7. Delivered Again 8. The Climb 9. Medevac Inbound 10. In Memory of Tom Burton 11. What’s It All About? 12. Operation Meade River 13. Let’s Not 14. Fishing Resort? 15. In Memory of William T. Hale 16. Willy’s Last Day 17. Gold Star Mother 18. Fall of the Eagle 19. Midnight Mortartown 20. Away to Uncompahgre 21. Emergency Leave 22. Sandra, Arch, and the Colonel 23. And I Saw My Mountains Once More before Leaving 24. Linus’s Blanket 25. Kielhofer: All in a Day’s Work 26. Cloud Disguises 27. A Last Goodnight 28. Awareness
Part Two: Home Front
29. Through White into Blue 30. Citadel 31. Anybody Home? 32. Crossing over the Pond 33. At China Beach 34. Haikus for You 35. I’m Here 36. Against the Tide 37. Forgiveness Forgotten 38. Fierce Communion 39. Our Peniel 40. Still 41. Disorientation 41A. Resolution
Part Three: Long After
42. Despite the Rain 43. Shining Horizon 44. Tea with Mr. Houng 45. Glenwood Canyon 46. Smoke Signals on the Periphery 47. Petals of a Smile 48. Ho Chi Minh City, Formerly Saigon 49. Lumahai Beach, Kaui 50. Fallujah Echoes Danang 51. The River Wins 52. Condominium of Hope 53. Peace Rock 54. Before Moving On
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NO REST ELSEWHERE Vietnam Notes, 1968-2008 By Allen Orcutt Foreword by John Andrews
“Jacob would be proud.” (1) A Marine pilot in the war zone wrote that in a poem to his wife between attack missions one night 40 years ago. He had seen death that day and would see more tomorrow.
The hours of darkness were a short and uncertain respite; the airbase itself was often mortared. In the morning his number might come up and he’d never go home again. Home would soon mean something different anyway; their marriage was collapsing. The biblical wrestling image was doubly apt.
Yet he held on fiercely to duty and country, faith and hope. Part of what helped him hold on was the catharsis of scribbling such poems in a DOD logbook. In God’s good time that pilot came home, rebuilt his life, and kept writing. “I will teach my son all about peace,” he poetically promised another wife long after. (2)
Over the decades, Allen Orcutt kept that promise. He has taught his children – and is now beginning to teach their children – all he can about how peace and honor can transcend war and violence, how love and loyalty can transcend loss and sorrow. The teaching continues with this book of Vietnam sketches in poetry, prose, old maps and grainy combat photos.
Unlike the often-stoic veterans of our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations, Allen has opened up his war memories for the life lessons they can provide the rest of us: comrades, friends, contemporaries, and descendants. I thank him. When you finish these pages, I believe you will too.
Only the inner circle of battlefield comrades can know the full meaning of what is here. But from the next circle, as a lifelong friend, I have known a good part of it. Allen and I were close as brothers in school, fellow volunteers for officer training, business partners and political allies later on, soulmates to this day. Submarine duty gave me few credentials to comment on the harrowing combat journal you’ll read here. What I can do, though, is stand character witness for the author. Absolute integrity is on every line. Blood and tears are in the ink.
This volume grows out of a smaller collection of poems published by Allen Orcutt in 1973, under the title Before Moving On. (3) At that time the war was still going on, he was back to civilian life working for my father, and I had become a presidential speechwriter, from which vantage point Allen asked me to write a foreword. I described the book as “the story of thirteen months in a man’s life, battle episodes sharing the stage with family scenes, introspection, friendship, tragedy.”
The present book, you will find, is all of that and something more. Now enriched by the perspective of a generation, and expanded with additional detail from the helicopter squadron in 1968-69 as well as from the author’s trip back to Vietnam in 2007, No Rest Elsewhere gets at deeper questions the previous edition didn’t anticipate. How can a year at war shape a lifetime of seven decades? How does a man finally become the man he is? It may even hold up a mirror for any reader to ask himself: What fires forged me into the person I am?
Three sections, “In Country,” “Home Front,” and “Long After,” unfold the narrative. We meet Allen’s fellow pilots including the fallen Willy Hale; the Vietnamese Mr. Houng who witnessed Hale’s death; college sweetheart Sandra who abruptly fled the Orcutts’ wartime marriage; and Barbara, Allen’s wife today. Andre and Georgia, his children with Barbara, as well as Amy and Ashley, his children with second wife Nancy, are sensed as a presence in the story though never introduced.
Another unseen presence here is the author’s fight with Parkinson’s disease for the past dozen years. Since the condition is known to Allen’s friends, I asked his permission to mention it. Does the high incidence of this and similar illnesses among veterans stem from their exposure to Agent Orange, the dangerous chemical defoliant? That’s uncertain. But the possibility heightens the book’s theme of what war can cost those who fight it – how it may forever change even those who survive. Courage may be demanded from the warrior, and from his loved ones, long after the shooting stops.
To vow at 25 that you are “determined to be the rock I say I am” amidst war and heartbreak, two storms at once, is character under pressure.(4) To look back at 65 and take inventory of how well you did – and print the results for review – to me that’s character of a higher order still. “Counting years is ugly work,” the younger Allen wrote when things seemed darkest.(5) “I’m so grateful… fare thee well,” the older Allen writes now. (6) Back then his pledge and prayer was to be “able to kiss a tormented sea.” (7) It seems he’s gotten there. The struggle was long, but rest finally came.
This brings us to the title of the new collection, “No Rest Elsewhere.” David Rennie, cited in the author’s introduction as a retired Marine, was also a Bible teacher. I suspect that his motto from a knight’s breastplate, given to Orcutt by Rennie as a talisman for battle, held scriptural overtones for the older man. A secret refuge in the Almighty and a table safe from enemies are mentioned by David the Psalmist. A rest like no other is Jesus’ promise to the weary and beleaguered. Such thoughts are not explicit here, for my friend isn’t one to sermonize. But listen closely and you’ll hear them in the poems.
When he says that “awareness is the constant path of my being,” it’s spiritual reliance that is meant, not just military vigilance.(8) The rest referred to is not found in escape or avoidance, but in keeping faith, hanging on and pushing through, wrestling to the limit of endurance like the patriarch in Genesis. In the Jacob poem quoted earlier, Allen speaks of “our Peniel,” the crucible of love and war.(9) It seems to me that Jacob would have approved the poet-pilot’s tenacity back then in wartime – and that he’d be prouder still today at the way this aging wrestler (Orcutt’s sport in high school, come to think of it) has yet to relinquish his grip.
Politics does not enter into any of this, then or now, even with America’s difficult experience in Iraq replaying the Vietnam agony in some ways. There is only the glancing reference in “Fallujah Echoes Danang” to enduring issues of savagery and civility in combat – more a military concern than a political one anyway. “Condominium of Hope” was prophetically titled in light of all the hopes riding on President Obama, yet the poem’s civic yearnings from 1969 seem no closer to realization in 2009.
Personal crises and victories are really the subject matter here. While the “endless surrender in disguise” may be a double reference to the no-win war as well as the author’s troubled marriage, the drama of the book ultimately turns on his emergence from the inward hell where “a very dead man screams in my ear.” (10) In two of the earlier poems, the rock seems to signify a solid place of rest. (11) In a later one about the Orcutts’ home in Glenwood Canyon, however, Allen suggests that was a false certainty: “Only a patient river wins the battle with the vertical rock [and] brings confidence to our mutual search for our souls.” (12) The ugliness encountered “when time freezes over” has given way at last to the beauty experienced as time flows on. (13)
As the weary pilot’s combat tour of duty ended, he felt sure “the problems I will face will never again be so consistently great, so persistently antagonistic, so emotionally bereft, so human.” (14) In some ways that has probably proved true. Yet for this “Colorado comet with an Oklahoma soul,” life after Vietnam was not going to be a mere postscript to war. (15) New challenges would keep forcing him back to the fields of honor and the fortress of faith. He would keep accepting those challenges in the simple belief that there was no rest elsewhere.
“You got to know how to hold a dream,” says Allen Orcutt in a latter-day meditation on what all the years, all the battles, all the sorrows and joys have meant. (16) He has held his with grit and grace, it seems to me after reading these writings.
-------------------------------------- References: 1. “Our Peniel” 2. “Peace Rock” 3. From the poem of that name 4. “Citadel” 5. “Forgiveness Forgotten” 6. “Resolution” 7. “At China Beach” 8. “Awareness” 9. “Our Peniel 10. “What’s It All About?” 11. “Peace Rock” and “Citadel” 12. “The River Wins” 13. “Forgiveness Forgotten” 14. “Before Moving On” 15. “Citadel” 16. “Despite the Rain”
Coalition opposes Sotomayor
(Denver, June 5) A coalition of Colorado groups and concerned citizens joined forces today in opposition to President Obama's nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the United States Supreme Court. Organized as the Colorado Judicial Network, they are urging the US Senate confirm only highly qualified individuals who put the rule of law ahead of personal political agendas. As former State Sen. John Andrews put it: “Barack Obama said he wanted to remake the Supreme Court with his judicial nominees. Yet we are told by the administration that this is a 'middle of the road' judge who sides with conservatives more often than liberals. The White House is attempting to confuse the American people, who deserve an honest airing of the differences between the Obama-Sotomayor view of the law and the Roberts-Alito-Scalia-Thomas approach to the Constitution and the role of the Court.” “Sonia Sotomayor's statement that a 'wise Latina woman' would generally make better decisions because of 'the richness of her experiences' than a white male reveals the extent to which political and personal agendas have supplanted the rule of law in selecting nominees.” said former State Treasurer Mark Hillman. “Rule of law requires that laws be written, accessible, understandable and uniformly applied. Obama understands his nominee has little interest in impartially applying the law. He also understands that this undermines the rule of law. He just doesn’t want the American people to understand. “
“We reject the notion that Sonia Sotomayor is a 'racist,'” said Jim Pfaff who heads the Judicial Confirmation Network's efforts in Colorado. “What motivates her to say a 'Latina woman' would make a better decision than a white male—as with her statement in 2004 that the courts make law—is a belief that the Rule of Law can be ignored whenever she wants to accomplish a favored political end.”
The Colorado Judicial Network is an organization of citizens joined together to support the confirmation of highly qualified individuals to the Supreme Court of the United States. They seek judicial nominees who stand for the Rule of Law and are committed to uphold the principles of judicial restraint and fidelity to the original meaning of the United States Constitution
The Colorado Judicial Netowrk Steering Committee includes:
** John Andrews, Chairman, Backbone America Citizens Alliance and former Colorado Senate President.
** Jon Caldara, President, Independence Institute.
** Mark Hillman, former State Treasurer.
** Jeff Crank, State Director, Americans for Prosperity.
** Jim Pfaff, former State Director, Americans for Prosperity and President/CEO, Colorado Family Institute.
Pfaff serves as press contact for the coalition and can be reached at jim@iresearchanddata.com or 303.957.8600