Impeach U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper

In 2006 Judge Florence-Marie Cooper issued an injunction that created a 12-nautical-mile zone off California's coast in which Navy sonar is banned. This was based on the imagination of environmentalists who think that sonar might potentially deafen whales or cause them to beach themselves. In other words, it is baseless speculation. Ed Feulner writes:

Last year U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper banned sonar tests within a 12-nautical-mile zone off the west coast. Such tests, she said, could harm marine life, including whales.

Yet the chief of naval operations says that area is critical to national defense. “The southern California operating area provides unique training opportunities that are vital to preparing our forces, and the planned exercises cannot be postponed without impacting national security,” Adm. Gary Roughead announced last month.

To allow the tests to proceed, President Bush granted the Navy an exemption. Obeying the judge’s orders would “undermine the Navy’s ability to conduct realistic training exercises that are necessary to ensure the combat effectiveness of carrier and expeditionary strike groups,” Bush said.

Now Judge Cooper has struck back. She’s overruled the administration and reinstated her ban.

Judge Cooper thinks that there is no such thing as a balance between powers in the U.S. Government. She thinks that a judge such as she should reign supreme over the other branches of government, able to not only rule on the law but also to create new laws. To add insult to injury, the law that she has ruled on in order to insult the President and the Navy is a law that she created herself.

Stated broadly, the roles of the three branches of government in the USA are:

• The legislature creates new laws and provides funding for them.
• The executive carries out the laws as well as it can.
• The judiciary enforces the law against those who break it.

As is hinted in the comments to this story, much of the Navy's defense against these charges is classified. Judge Cooper does not hold a security clearance so the Navy could not present its defense to her and certainly not in open court.

The "law" that Judge Cooper has enforced is an injunction that she imposed herself without basing it on the legislated or common law. It betrays the constitutional duty of the Executive Branch to defend the USA. In other words, it is not a law at all, but an overreaching of the court and an attempt to seize the legislative duty of Congress for the Judiciary.

In its overreaching it is reminiscent of a case from last year where Judge Cooper threw out a lawsuit from TorrentSpy, ruling that it destroyed evidence, all because the company did not keep and turn over a log of all data that passed through the RAM of their computers. Those who are programmers will realize what a outrageously difficult task that would be. But Cooper (thinks she) knows better, and the MPAA is happy because it did not have to answer inconvenient questions about the ethics of obtaining private emails from TorrentSpy executives. And it set a precedent.

Under this interpretation, any data stored in RAM could be subject to a subpoena, as at a basic level it is a "medium from which information can be obtained" just like a hard drive.

Back to the sonar case. It gets worse. Following Cooper's new ruling, Magistrate Judge Elizabeth D. Laporte has ruled the US Navy must establish mid-frequency-sonar-free zones in non-US waters around the Galapagos Islands, Equador, Australia, the Mediterranean and Hawaii. Now US environmentalists and the Environmental Protection Act dictate military doctrine halfway around the world.

Judge Cooper's rulings are an abomination against US law and must be punished. This sort of thing is not new or surprising, and heretofore it has been tolerated, but it is long past time to take action against judges who attempt to take for themselves the powers of other branches of government. Such action invites its own reaction. Elected legislators who pass terrible laws can lose their position in elections. They are responsible to their constituents. Impeachment is the only way to get rid of unelected judges. Judge Florence-Marie Cooper must be impeached, as otherwise she will continue to steal the constitutional powers of the other branches of government.



Technorati Tags: Crime and Punishment, Florence-Marie Cooper, Sonar, Impeachment