http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20050926&s=blumenthalOn April 7, five months prior to this hearing, Michael Schwartz, Coburn's chief of staff, told me, "Tom doesn't know anything about this judiciary stuff, so I'm feeding him piles and piles of memos every day." Though Schwartz didn't specify the nature of his memos to Coburn, I assumed they were made up of primers on legal jargon and history, not word games, puzzles or other such brainteasers.
I met Schwartz outside a downtown Washington hotel, where a gathering of Christian-right activists called "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith" was taking place. In a speech earlier that day, Schwartz told conference attendees he favored "the mass impeachment of judges" and denounced the Supreme Court for giving Americans "the right to commit buggery." Later, while a think tank researcher and I accompanied him to the Dupont Circle subway station, coincidentally located in the heart of one of America's most vibrant gay neighborhoods, Schwartz held forth with his vision for the judiciary.
At the very beginning of our conversation, before I could even introduce myself, Schwartz exclaimed, "I'm a radical! I'm a real extremist. I don't want to impeach judges. I want to impale them!"
Schwartz struck a slightly more even-tempered tone when discussing Senator Arlen Specter, a socially moderate Republican who had become the bete noire of the Christian right since assuming the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee. "Specter is the Great Satan, of course," Schwartz remarked. "But still, I'd rather have him as committee chair than
Orrin Hatch, because Specter knows how to terrorize the opposition."
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