Tom DeLay continues his extraordinary effort to disenfranchise the judiciary as a coequal branch of government with a rant to the faithful at the Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration.

“The judiciary branch of our government has overstepped its authority on countless occasions, overturning and in some cases just ignoring the legitimate will of the people,” DeLay said. “But I also believe the executive and legislative branches have neglected the proper checks and balances on this behavior … Our next step, whatever it is, must be more than rhetoric.”

Delay’s remarks were delivered on tape because he was busy cloaking himself in the skin of yet another dead person, the anti-corporatist, anti-war, anti-death penalty Pope John Paul II, something we can expect the president to do as well.

His meat puppet at the conference, Texas Republican Lamar Smith, told Knight Ridder that “judges continue to substitute their own political views for the law, and we must push back,” and that if Red Tom pursued a vendetta against the Schiavo judges, “I would certainly be a part of any effort that Tom DeLay was. If that’s the direction that the leaders want to go, I would be happy to go that direction as well.”

Federal judges are given lifetime appointments precisely so that they can outlast the corrupt, short term passions of a man like Red Tom, whose venality extends even to the point of accepting money and largesse from Russia while attempting to torpedo Bill Clinton’s Russia-opposed policies during the wars spawned by the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The current effort to delegitimate the courts is an echo of the “Impeach Earl Warren” campaign back in the early 1960′s, a campaign that had its roots in reaction to Warren’s first major opinion as a Supreme Court justice: Brown v. Board of Education.

If Red Tom had his way, he’d exhume Earl Warren and impeach him today. In his view, the courts are meant to be the legislative branch’s punk, not its equal, and the judiciary’s temerity in flouting his will in the Schiavo case and, probably fairly soon, his own, requires punishment. And he’s willing to destroy the country to preserve his prerogatives and his own hide.

The war on the courts isn’t limited to the “moral” issues propelling the current outbreak of hostilities. Tort reform, limiting the ability of individual citizens to hold corporate beasts to account, was not only, perhaps even not mostly, an effort to tip the balance of power more heavily toward the corporate community: it was a calculated and successful effort to discredit the judges and juries involved in civil litigation as well, to further the notion that the courts and the legal process hold no special place in our society.

This is what Republican Congressman Chris Shays meant when he said, during the heat of the Schiavo travesty, that “this Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy,” although theocracy is just the most convenient disguise worn by the latest generation of a cult of totalitarian creeps. Federalism be damned: Red Tom and his comrades in Congress want it all.

He is exactly whom George Orwell had in mind when Orwell created the classic Animal Farm slogan: “All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others.”

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