Brownback Mountain
by digby
You cannot make this stuff up:
Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who blocked the confirmation of a woman to the federal bench because she attended a same-sex commitment ceremony for the daughter of her long-time neighbors, says he will now allow a vote on the nomination.
[…]
Mr. Brownback, who has been criticized for blocking the nomination, said he would also no longer press a proposed solution he offered on Dec. 8 that garnered even more criticism: that he would remove his block if Judge Neff agreed to recuse herself from all cases involving same-sex unions.
In an interview last week, Mr. Brownback said that he still believed Judge Neff’s behavior raised serious questions about her impartiality and that he was likely to vote against her. But he said he did not realize his proposal — asking a nominee to agree in advance to remove herself from deciding a whole category of cases — was so unusual as to be possibly unprecedented. Legal scholars said it raised constitutional questions of separation of powers for a senator to demand that a judge commit to behavior on the bench in exchange for a vote.
Mr. Brownback said that he believed Judge Neff’s attendance at the 2002 ceremony merited further investigation, but that he had not meant to set any precedent with his proposal. “It was the last day of the session and I was just trying to provide some accommodation to see if we could make this thing go forward,” he said.
He said that “this is a big hot-button issue” and that Judge Neff had not made it clear that her presence at the ceremony did not mean she could not rule without bias in deciding cases involving same-sex unions. “I’d like to know more factually about what took place,” he said
I’ll bet he would. Was it two women or two men? How were they dressed? Did they kiss a the alter? Tongues?
This, by the way is the same guy who’s involved in one of the freakiest sideshow cults in DC:
Brownback is also reticent about his membership in The Family, a shadowy Christian-right group comprising all-male elites. Some of its most famous members have included Watergate crook Charles Colson, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and the brutal Somalian former dictator, Mohammed Siad Barre. “The goal [of The Family] is an “invisible” world organization led by Christ–that’s what they aspire to,” Jeff Sharlet, a journalist who revealed The Family’s inner workings in Harper’s Magazine, said in an interview with Alternet.
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