I try to avoid taking the easy shots. Going after the easy targets always seemed to me like swatting a fly with a Buick: overkill and just going to be more trouble than it’s worth. However, on some occasions it just needs to be done. For this reason, I stand up today in defense of Google. Well, more to the point, I stand up against the ridiculousness of Tom DeLay.

As some of you may know, Mr. DeLay recently excoriated Justice Anthony Kennedy for his “activist” leanings. Never mind that Justice Kennedy was a Republican appointee and has been a fairly consistent vote for the center-right viewpoints of this country on our nation’s highest court. Also, never mind that Justice Kennedy cast one of the deciding votes that helped President Bush sneak into the White House in the dead of night back in 2000. Apparently pushing a right wing president into power over the will of the people and backing your point of view most of the time isn’t enough for Mr. DeLay. Now you apparently have to ignore everyone and everything outside of your own backyard in order to be a responsible jurist.

Mr. DeLay’s first problem is that Justice Kennedy had the audacity to look to international law when making a decision regarding the death penalty for juveniles. In Roper v. Simmons he looked to international law in order to gain a greater understanding of what “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” would require in determining when and how the death penalty should be meted out (if at all). He did so because this is required explicitly by prior jurisprudence, specifically that in Trop v. Dulles. Justice Kennedy looked to the laws of individual states and the world at large to determine where our maturing society stood; to determine if the United States, as regards the death penalty, was more like the United Kingdom or more like Somalia. Somalia and the United States are at the present time the only two nations who have failed to ratify Article 37 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child which contains an express prohibition against capital punishment for crimes committed while under the age of 18. Justice Kennedy looked to international law not to be bound by it, but to be persuaded by it. Justice Kennedy was not “activist” but was following the law as it stood. For Mr. DeLay, apparently “activist” means not doing what Mr. DeLay tells you to do.

But Mr. DeLay goes on to denounce Justice Kennedy for doing his own research on the internet. Recently on Fox News Radio, Mr. DeLay chastised Justice Kennedy saying, “And not only that, but he said in session that he does his own research on the Internet? That is just incredibly outrageous.” Apparently Mr. DeLay feels threatened when a member of the judiciary actually takes a moment to look at the world as a whole and does some research to come to a conclusion. Perhaps he’s worried that once a judge sees what the world is like he or she will realize that the vast majority of viewpoints that Mr. DeLay’s espouses, much like those of the radical right that he represents, are just hogwash and aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on or the cyberspace bandwidth they take up.

In the end, Mr. DeLay will be much like the description of life by MacBeth; full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. He will continue to concoct vast conspiracies and threaten all who oppose him because that is all he has left. After years of doing the bidding of corporate thieves like Enron and Westar, years of squeezing dirty money out of the hands of willing lobbyists, years of bullying members of his own party into submission, all he has left is one of the worst ethical records in the history of electoral politics and a seat in Congress that he can barely cling to. After the next election, hopefully that seat won’t be his anymore either.