The sense that America is on the cusp of chaos was nearly universal at the conference, leading to calls for a radical restructuring of American government. On panel after panel, speakers -- including Michael Schwartz, Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn's chief of staff -- demanded the impeachment of judges who disagree with the doctrine of Antonin Scalia-style strict constructionism. Several asserted the right of the president and Congress to disregard court decisions they think are unconstitutional. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was excoriated with the kind of venom the right once reserved for Hillary Clinton.

On a Friday panel titled "Remedies to Judicial Tyranny," a constitutional lawyer named Edwin Vieira discussed Kennedy's majority opinion in Lawrence vs. Texas, which struck down that state's anti-sodomy law. Vieira accused Kennedy of relying on "Marxist, Leninist, Satanic principals drawn from foreign law" in his jurisprudence.

What to do about communist judges in thrall to Beelzebub? Vieira said, "Here again I draw on the wisdom of Stalin. We're talking about the greatest political figure of the 20th century  He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him whenever he ran into difficulty. 'No man, no problem.'"

The audience laughed, and Vieira repeated it. "'No man, no problem.' This is not a structural problem we have. This is a problem of personnel."

As Dana Milbank pointed out Saturday in the Washington Post, the full Stalin quote is this: "Death solves all problems: no man, no problem." Milbank suggested that Kennedy would be wise to hire more bodyguards.

Was Vieira calling for assassination? I'm not sure. The conference's rhetoric, though, certainly suggested that judges deserve to reap the horrors they have ostensibly sown. The affair finished with a rousing speech by recent Republican senatorial candidate Alan Keyes, who drew enthusiastic applause when he said, "I believe that in our country today the judiciary is the focus of evil."

It is a challenge to know how seriously to take this sort of thing. The world inhabited by most of those at the conference seems so at odds with empirical reality that one expects it to collapse around them. With each new lunacy perpetrated by religious fundamentalists, progressives tell each other that any second the pendulum will swing the other way and some equilibrium will return to our national life. They've been telling each other that for more than four years. But the influence of religious authoritarianism keeps growing.

The Confronting the Judicial War on Faith conference was not large -- it drew at most 200 people. The speakers and attendees, though, included many of the core figures of the religious right. Even if they fail in their far-reaching plan for eviscerating the judiciary -- and in the near term they almost certainly will -- the Republican Party will try to push through aspects of their agenda. Thus it's worth taking note of exactly whose agenda it is.

One conference speaker was Howard Phillips, the hulking former Nixon staffer who helped midwife the new right. Years ago, Phillips, along with Richard Viguerie and Paul Weyrich, recruited a little-known Baptist preacher named Jerry Falwell to start the Moral Majority. Though he was raised Jewish, Phillips is now an evangelical Christian who told me he was profoundly influenced by the late R.J. Rushdoony, the founder of Christian Reconstructionism. "Rushdoony had a tremendous impact on my thinking," Phillips said. As time goes on, he said, Rushdoony's influence is growing.

Christian Reconstructionism calls for a system that is both radically decentralized, with most government functions devolved to the county level, and socially totalitarian. It calls for the death penalty for homosexuals, abortion doctors and women guilty of "unchastity before marriage," among other moral crimes. To be fair, Phillips told me that "just because a crime is capital doesn't mean you must impose the death penalty. It means it's an option." Public humiliation, he said, could sometimes be used instead.

Herb Titus, another Rushdoony follower, also spoke. He was the dean of the law school at Pat Robertson's Regent University. As Sara Diamond, a scholar of the conservative movement, wrote in her book "Not By Politics Alone: The Enduring Influence of the Christian Right," "In the early 1990s, at a time when Robertson was seeking academic accreditation for the law school, Titus was forced to resign when he refused to renounce his belief in Christian Reconstructionism."

Some Republicans might have decided that, in the wake of the Terri Schiavo controversy and the possible public backlash, it wasn't a good idea to be seen in such company. The pope's funeral gave DeLay an excuse not to show up in person, and Republican Sens. Sam Brownback and Tom Coburn, both initially listed on the conference Web site, also dropped out.

Still, several congressmen and congressional staffers gave their enthusiastic endorsement to the conference, using much the same language as Phillips, Titus and Scarborough. Speaking via video, DeLay apologized for missing the event and emphasized its importance. "Judicial unaccountability is not a political issue," he said. "It is a threat to self-government." Then he enumerated the measures Congress was taking. The House, he said, has already passed an amendment that breaks up "that leftist 9th circuit that meets in San Francisco" -- the court that ruled the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional -- "and told them they could go meet in Guam."

Recent Stories