An independent judiciary is one of the basic requirements for democracy. The court is the citizen's last line of defense against a corrupt legislature, or a dictatorial executive. However, ever since the election of 2002, the political impartiality of the United States Supreme Court has been in question. Many said that it was a Republican-dominated court that "appointed" a Republican president by stopping the vote counting, but others said that the court should be given the benefit of the doubt. It is beginning to look like the doubters were wrong.

The case of the Cheney Energy Task Force is now before the court. Vice President Cheney assembled a secret panel to set the official energy policy of the US government, and--surprise, surprise!--that policy ended up favoring non-renewable energy sources such as those of the oil industry.

Who was on the panel? Cheney won't say. What is the correlation between membership on the panel and donations to the Republican Party? We don't know. Was Cheney bribed? Another unknown. Cheney has stonewalled the issue all the way up to the Supreme Court.

It is Cheney verses the public's right to know, but how can the public be protected when one of the court members, Justice Scalia, is Cheney's duck hunting partner? Scalia and Cheney went duck hunting in Louisiana in January after the issue came before the court.

Can there be any question that Scalia can not be an impartial jurist? However, not only does he refuse to recluse himself, Chief Justice Rehnquist--another Republican--supports him. This may be the most slanted Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision claimed that Negroes were property, not people.

We have a Republican judiciary, a Republican congress, and a Republican president. All of the checks and balances that the Founding Fathers built into our government have been swept away. It is now one-party rule ... like the Baathists of Iraq, the Taliban of Afghanistan, or the Ayatollahs of Iran.

Webster's dictionary defines oligarchy as "a government in which a small group exercised control, especially for corrupt and selfish purposes." That is exactly what we have under Bush and Cheney.

John P. Galuszka II

SERENDIPITY SYSTEMS
Milan, NH
Big Sur, CA