I've been sitting here listening to the nice-sounding words heaping forth from some of our "esteemed" senators over the so-called agreement reached about judicial nominees, filibusters, and the Trent Lott-named "nuclear option" to eliminate senate judicial filibusters.

One of things that stands out to me: the extreme right of the Republican Party is not satisfied with winning some of the time. It is not satisfied with winning an overwhelming majority of the time.

Priscilla Owen, William H. Pryor, and Janice Rogers Brown, all three of whom have been "vigorously" opposed by senate Democrats, will get rubber-stamped into a lifetime seat on our federal courts.

From the very start, this has been about a lot more than just these three, or the others waiting in the wings. This is about the vacancies that are coming up in the Supreme Court. The Bush administration has had its Machiavellian eye on the Supreme Court from day one.

Gain control of the Supreme Court, and control of all three branches of government will be in your hands. Am I making too much of this, or taking it to an absurd conclusion?

May I remind people of James Madison, in Federalist Paper 47: "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

The specter of Bill Frist eliminating all filibustering of judicial nominees was not a nice one to contemplate, let alone deal with. Yet the Democratic Party caving in to extortion is worse. They, through their compromise, have helped ensure the completion of the Radical Right's three-way power grab.

It's just one more thing convincing me that we only have one party in this country, with only minor differences in the opposing ends of the same stick--the one we keep getting hit with. These parties care more about "preserving the institution" of the senate than they do about the people whose name they so freely and constantly invoke. How can giving away the courts be in the interest of the American people?

In 1935, Sinclair Lewis wrote his novel, "It Can't Happen Here", a fictional account of what amounts to a fascist take-over of this country. I wonder what the title of a sequel would be if Sinclair Lewis were alive today? Perhaps "The 15% Solution: A History of American Fascism, 2001-2022", another supposedly-fictional account of the rise of fascism by constitutional means (which perfectly describes this nation today since 9/11).

Ron Paul, in my opinion one of the only Republicans in Congress with integrity, said in 2004 that "Those who believe a police state can't happen here are poor students of history. Every government, democratic or not, is capable of tyranny. We must understand this if we hope to remain a free people."

If a government wants to secure complete power and control over that which they govern, control of the courts is an absolute must. It's all about gaining enough power and control to ensure that everyone will be forced to live according to the leadership's worldview; and they will have the courts to back them up.

Do my words read like "the sky is falling"? So be it. I can't stress enough the danger we face with this power grab for the courts. There will nothing to stand between people and government-corporate power.

The very people that lied America into invading Iraq and then lied about lying, are the people who determine whom will sit as life-time judges on U.S. federal courts.

Maybe the sky really is falling.


Jack Dalton is a disabled Vietnam veteran, writer and activist.