Last Sunday’s column on Republican Party of Iowa Chairman A.J. Spiker’s call to oust another Iowa Supreme Court justice in the name of cynical same-sex marriage politics drew a little mail.
…But one email stood out. It was from Cedar Rapids attorney William McCartan, who took issue with Spiker’s politicized declaration of anti-judicial independence and wrote a letter to the GOP State Central Committee.
“I write to you as a lifelong Republican. I was stunned to see that our party had today issued an official call for the removal of a justice of the Iowa Supreme Court based on a disagreement with one of the Court’s rulings. Our courts protect our freedom from the encroachment of government power. As Republicans, I thought we stood FOR that proposition — not against it,” McCartan wrote, adding “shameful” and “radical” for good measure.
Next morning, he received the first response from committee member Jamie Johnson of Stratford. He insisted that the court, in striking down Iowa’s ban on same-sex marriages, assumed power “that no human government can possess.”
…McCartan wasn’t impressed.
“Two days later, I officially changed my party registration to ‘No Party,’ ” McCartan told me in his email. That’s too bad, because one of our only two major parties just got more extreme, less reasonable.
…Responsible, truly conservative GOP leaders need to stand up and say enough.
Read the full article from The Gazette, written by Todd Dorman.
