The Thirteen Scariest People in America

Old Trout Magazine. Posted October 30, 2006.

The Thirteen Worst People in America:

Scariest Presidential Candidate: Sam Brownback / Senator (R-Kansas)

by Mary Reinholz

Once a moderate in the Bob Dole mold, Sen. Sam Brownback has morphed into a zealous man of God intent on protecting millions of fetuses from what he calls the yearly "holocaust" of abortion. Brownback actually considers fetuses to be full-blown American citizens.

Just another religious nut stalking the corridors of power? Well, yes, but this ambitious pol is the favored 2008 presidential candidate of the radical right. Brownback seems hell-bent on establishing not just faith-based initiatives, but "faith in politics" -- i.e., an authoritarian Christian theocracy.

The man speaks softly but pushes the Passion of the Christ in the culture wars, blasting gay marriage, porn, stem cell re-search and, most recently, assisted suicide. One of Brown-back's glorious moments came when he proposed introducing a bill in the Senate that would compel pregnant women considering abortions to provide anesthetics for their fetuses.

But no matter how over the top his political posturing, no one seems to be laughing at Brownback's bid to succeed Bush -- certainly not the influential Bible-thumpers supporting him like Pat Robertson and Chuck Colson. Senator Rick Santorum (R-Pennsylvania) sponsored Brownback's conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2002, and he was later baptized in a chapel run by the secretive lay society Opus Dei.

On the economic front, the pious Senator perceived no moral quandary in accepting $42,000 from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Along the way, Brownback apparently has had access to the deep pockets of his wife, the former Mary Stauffer, whose family used to own a media conglomerate.

Brownback's 1995 bout with potentially fatal cancer intensified his right-to-life ardor, but his religious beliefs didn't stop him from living, until recently, in a $600-a-month apartment in a $1.1 million Capitol Hill townhouse owned by members of Congress and subsidized by a secretive religious organization, known variously as The Fellowship and The Foundation and registered with the IRS as a church. Brownback is a regular member of one of the group's "prayer cells."

Perhaps he prays for the Supreme Court to display the Ten Commandments since the courts, believes Brownback, have overstretched "separation of church and state" to mean "removal of church from state."

Scariest Judge: Edith Hollan Jones / Chief Justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit

by Paul Drexel

Imagine you're a woman working at a company where male colleagues send you X-rated notes, hit on you, and repeatedly grab your breasts -- even once pinch your butt with pliers. To Judge Edith Jones, such depravity does not constitute grounds for a sexual harassment case, though she conceded the facts. During arguments in the case the woman brought against her employers (Waltman v. International Paper), Jones purportedly commented that the behavior of the man who had pinched the woman's breasts wasn't so objectionable since he later apologized. And, added the judge, at least she hadn't been raped.

Such an injudicious temperament would be chilling in any courtroom, but that it belongs to an Appeals Court Chief Justice -- and a woman who has been on Dubya's shortlist for Supreme Court vacancies -- ought to send up a red flag visible even to the color-blind. It once did, when Bush The Elder bypassed Jones after critics successfully labeled her "too extreme" for Supreme Court consideration and instead turned to David Souter. While it's autre temps under Bush Junior, he seems to have kept Daddy's old list; after Christian fundamentalists scuttled the nomination of Harriet Miers, Jones could surface as the next Court nominee -- especially if the President feels pressure to name a woman. But to cast Jones -- who graduated from the University of Texas Law School in 1974, and received her first appointment to the federal bench (by Ronald Reagan) in 1985 -- as a more qualified Miers doesn't do her justice; Judge Jones is no less a federalist than Clarence Thomas.

Like Thomas, Jones likes to refer to the 18th century for guidance in her judicial opinions. In a speech she gave to Harvard Law School's branch of the right-wing Federalist Society, Jones neatly summed up her backward-looking legal philosophy. "The first 100 years of American lawyers were trained on Blackstone, who wrote that 'the law of nature, dictated by God himself, is binding in all counties and at all times; no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this' ... The Framers created a government of limited power with this understanding of the rule of law -- that it was dependent on transcendent religious obligation."

Conservatives and corporations alike have a friend in Judge Jones. She champions states' rights (except when it comes to Roe v. Wade). She sees the field of employment discrimination litigation as ripe for abuse by plaintiffs. She disdains criminal defendants and complains that the "over-constitution-alization" of criminal-case procedures tilts the system away from punishing the guilty in favor of applying "fairness" to alleged lawbreakers.

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