Washington Post writer Dana Milbank:

lawyer-author Edwin Vieira told the gathering that [Supreme Court Justice Anthony] Kennedy should be impeached because his philosophy, evidenced in his opinion striking down an anti-sodomy statute, “upholds Marxist, Leninist, satanic principles drawn from foreign law.”

Ominously, Vieira continued by saying his “bottom line” for dealing with the Supreme Court comes from Joseph Stalin. “He had a slogan, and it worked very well for him, whenever he ran into difficulty: ‘no man, no problem,’” Vieira said.

The full Stalin quote, for those who don’t recognize it, is “Death solves all problems: no man, no problem.” Presumably, Vieira had in mind something less extreme than Stalin did and was not actually advocating violence. But then, these are scary times for the judiciary. An anti-judge furor may help confirm President Bush’s judicial nominees, but it also has the potential to turn ugly.

A judge in Atlanta and the husband and mother of a judge in Chicago were murdered in recent weeks. After federal courts spurned a request from Congress to revisit the Terri Schiavo case, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) said that “the time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) mused about how a perception that judges are making political decisions could lead people to “engage in violence.”

“The people who have been speaking out on this, like Tom DeLay and Senator Cornyn, need to be backed up,” [conservative activist Phyllis] Schlafly said to applause yesterday.

(You can listen to Vieira’s invocation of Stalin here. The audio quality isn’t very good.)

New York Times columnist Frank Rich:

It’s not for nothing that Mr. DeLay’s nickname is the Hammer. Or that early in his Christian Coalition career, Ralph Reed famously told a Knight-Ridder reporter that he wanted to see his opponents in a “body bag.” The current manifestation of this brand of religious politics can be found in the far right’s anti-judiciary campaign, of which Mr. DeLay is the patron saint. As he flew off to the pope’s funeral in Rome, the congressman left behind a rabble-rousing video for a Washington conference on “Confronting the Judicial War on Faith” staged by a new outfit called The Judeo-Christian Council for Constitutional Restoration. Another speaker, a lawyer named Edwin Vieira, twice invoked a Stalin dictum whose unexpurgated version goes, “Death solves all problems; no man, no problem.” The reporter who covered the event for The Washington Post, Dana Milbank, suggested in print that one prime target of the vitriol, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, might want to get “a few more bodyguards.” It wasn’t necessarily a joke.

You can see why Dick Cheney and President Bush in rapid succession distanced themselves from Mr. DeLay’s threats of retribution against judges who presided in the Schiavo case. If an Eric Rudolph murders a judge in close chronological proximity to that kind of rhetoric, they’ve got a political Armageddon on their hands.

Republican Senator and video diagnostician Bill Frist joins the jihad:

As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as “against people of faith” for blocking President Bush’s nominees.