Dangerous Threats

[groovedaddy]

Representative Denny Rehberg, a Republican and Montana’s House member, boasts that he brings Made-in-Montana solutions to Washington. His latest, proposed last week in a speech advocating states’ rights to the State Legislature, is to put a judge “on the Endangered Species List.”

The congressman had in mind Judge Donald Molloy of the Federal District Court for Montana, though he didn’t name him, because of a ruling the judge made reinstating protection of the Endangered Species Act for gray wolves. He did not mean that Judge Molloy should be protected and nurtured, which is the actual purpose of the species law.

Mr. Rehberg’s spokesman said: “Denny did not threaten anyone, let alone a federal judge. Nor would he.” But to the judge’s children, writing in protest on Sunday in The Independent Record, a daily newspaper in Helena, Mont., the words made a threat, “either veiled or outright,” and that was “not acceptable.”

Taking Mr. Rehberg’s spokesman at his word, the idea that a judge should be singled out in political retribution because a congressman doesn’t like his rulings is outrageous. As the judge’s children wrote, a judge has “a constitutional responsibility to interpret and apply the laws that Congress enacts, based on the facts and law presented in the courtroom, and not on public opinion.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/opinion/16wed2.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha211