{"id":3924,"date":"2005-04-07T12:42:22","date_gmt":"2005-04-07T16:42:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/3924.html"},"modified":"2005-04-07T12:42:22","modified_gmt":"2005-04-07T16:42:22","slug":"of-all-the-hacks-for-frist-to-hook-up-with","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/of-all-the-hacks-for-frist-to-hook-up-with\/","title":{"rendered":"Of all the hacks for Frist to hook up with…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Just when it seemed Bill Frist was trying to distance himself<\/a> from some of the loonier, anti-judicial branch segments of his party, he reverses course<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) will host a private tour of the Capitol next week led by a controversial Republican religious operative who advocates the impeachment of “activist” federal judges.<\/p>\n

Democrats were quick to question Frist’s choice of tour guides.<\/p>\n

David Barton, vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party, was invited by Frist to give the tour, which the Tennessee Senator described in a March 31 invitation to all 100 Senators as “a Fresh Perspective on Our Nation’s Religious Heritage.”<\/p>\n

“He is an historian noted for his detailed research into the religious heritage of our nation,” Frist wrote his colleagues.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s a lot of inanity here, but let’s start with the one most connected to recent events. While Frist is telling reporters<\/a> that he “respects” the “fair and independent judiciary” the United States enjoys, David Barton advocates impeachment for judges who disagree with him.<\/p>\n

As for federal judges, Barton calls for Congress to take a greater oversight role of the judiciary by invoking its power to remove a judge when Congress believes he has overstepped his bounds. <\/p>\n

“Today’s judiciary, not having experienced any serious threat of impeachment as judges in earlier generations, repeatedly flaunts its contempt for the will of the people,” Barton wrote in a separate article posted on his Web site…. “It is true that impeachment is a cumbersome process, and achieving a conviction is difficult,” Barton writes. “However, on most occasions, just the threat of impeachment produces results.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Probably not the kind of fringe activist with whom the Senate Majority Leader should be arranging tours of the Capitol.
\n
\nAnd as long as we’re on the subject, for Frist to call Barton a “noted historian” proves that the Senate Majority Leader has no idea what he’s talking about. As I explained<\/a> a couple of months ago, Barton is a rabid GOP partisan, but he has no academic credentials as a historian, and his “scholarly” work has routinely been discredited by real academicians. In Bush’s America, where Republican activists pretend to be reporters<\/a>, it’s only fitting that Republican activists also get to pretend to be historians and tour guides for Bill Frist.<\/p>\n

As a friend of mine told Roll Call<\/a> yesterday:<\/p>\n

While Frist lauded Barton’s historical expertise, his detractors suggest his conclusions are not based in fact. <\/p>\n

“He is to American history what the fundamentalist creationists are to science,” said Rob Boston, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “Barton doesn’t like the fact that the United States was founded as a secular Republic. So he has created a cut-and-paste revisionist history designed to show we were actually founded to be a Christian nation.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just when it seemed Bill Frist was trying to distance himself from some of the loonier, anti-judicial branch segments of his party, he reverses course. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) will host a private tour of the Capitol next week led by a controversial Republican religious operative who advocates the impeachment of “activist” federal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}