KINDER'S COMMENTARY: REVOLT IS BREWING AGAINST JUDICIAL TYRANNY IN AMERICA

A gathering revolt against judicial tyranny across America will, I predict, become one of the salient facts of American life over the next 10 to 20 years. Signs abound, though some are mere straws in the wind.

Right here in Missouri, the judges didn't exactly have exquisite timing in asking for more pay. Based on visits with colleagues in the House and Senate, the proposed pay raise for lawmakers and judges, recommended by the new commission on the compensation of elected officials, is dead on arrival in your state Capitol. Here's hoping that proves true, as I'll join many others the first day in introducing a resolution to reject it. Next we'll push a constitutional amendment to repeal the whole, phony commission, easily one of the most bogus accretions ever grafted onto your state government.

The little Show Me State tempest over salaries, however, unfolds against what is clearly a growing revolt against American judges and their judicial tyranny. No offense, guys and gals (some of my best friends are judges, honest!), but enough of your number have richly earned the contempt of all freedom-loving Americans. Inevitable corrective measures, once unthinkable, are increasingly widely recommended, and those of us who love a good fight are ready. First, the bloody outrages.

"It's Time to Take On the Judges," trumpets the headline over a splendid lead editorial in The Weekly Standard, a favorite magazine. The Standard boldly declares what Americans increasingly believe: "We are in a crisis. ... The crisis is the brazen interference of the judicial branch of government in the decision-making authority of the American electorate." In every crisis, the writer reminds us, "there is opportunity," in this case "the opportunity ... to change public perceptions of the courts, to alter the dynamic between the courts and American society, and to shift the balance of political power back where it belongs, to elected officials and the American people."

All this is bad news for liberals. As their string of humiliating electoral defeats has stretched back more than a generation, liberals have increasingly relied on the courts to enact a massively unpopular agenda that can't be found in the Constitution and that no legislative body will adopt.

Gay marriages? This notion, rejected by the Congress and by 18 state legislatures, is being forced on an American populace, once thought to be self-governing, by a single Hawaiian judge. Judicially ordered tax increases? It happened right here in Missouri, nearly a decade ago, by a Jimmy Carter-appointed judicial Stalinist named Russell Clark. Cost: Over a billion dollars in a world-class catastrophe called the Kansas City desegregation case. It's one of the two most expensive desegregation cases in world history (the other is in St. Louis.) After all the spending, at last report, the dropout rate in Kansas City for entering high school freshmen was 60 percent.

Did 4.7 million Californians vote for the California Civil Rights Initiative, which would take back civil-rights law by enshrining in the Golden State Constitution the color-blind language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Well, another lone judge, and yet another crackpot Jimmy Carter appointeee, struck it down, case pending. Did 814,000 Coloradoans pass an amendment barring localities from enacting laws granting special status to homosexuals? A court struck it down and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the notorious Romer V. Evans case.

NEXT: More outrages, and radical corrective measures that don't exactly include pay raises.

~Peter Kinder is an assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.