HORSE AND CARRIAGE

The rehearsal dinner was at Buckner’s Brewery, which backs up to the twelve foot high levy that keeps Cape Girardeau, Missouri from being a lake.

The locals don’t seem to notice. I guess when you are born and raised within earshot of the mighty Mississippi you get used to it.

But it was all very novel for the Brennan and Schafer clans, which assembled from Michigan, Illinois and Florida to celebrate the marriage of Thomas E. Brennan III to Meghan Elizabeth Jones.

What are the chances that a young man who grew up in East Lansing and now lives and works in Grand Rapids would meet, court and marry a girl who was born in Cape Girardeau and worked in Shaumburg, outside of Chicago, Illinois?

Mighty slim in my day.

Odds were you’d marry someone who was born less than twenty-five miles from you. A school mate. Your pal’s sister. A bridesmaid at your brother’s wedding.

But somebody from some place you never heard of? Not likely.

And we weren’t surrounded by men and women in their twenties and thirties for whom the prospect of marriage and family is seen as an aberration, a burden, a detour on the road to happiness. At best an interruption of the good life.

Frank Sinatra sang it for us: Love and marriage go together like horse and carriage. Taking up casual residence with a person of the opposite sex was a criminal offense known as lewd and lascivious cohabitation. If you were open and notorious about it, it might just become a common law marriage.

The idea of advertising for companionship in the personals column of the classified page was considered a sign of discouragement, if not desperation.

All that has changed. Now there’s match dot com.

And that’s how they met. Shared religion. Shared politics. Shared family experience and values.

Pictures exchanged. Emails flew back and forth. Laughs were shared. Opinions expressed. Phone calls and Skypes turned acquaintances into friends and friends into lovers.

By the time they met face to face they knew each other pretty well. All it took was a few kisses to seal the deal.

He asked her father for her hand, bought her a ring and proposed. She said yes and immediately set about planning the wedding.

No big problem. That’s what she does for the Marriott chain. Plan weddings and such.

Watching the merger of the Brennan and Jones families has been an exhilarating exercise for me. My son, Thomas E. Brennan, Jr., the retired judge, father of the groom and host of the rehearsal dinner, expressed it this way in his welcoming remarks:

“Frank and I are already good buddies even though we have little in common! He runs, I walk. He’s a fisherman, I’m a golfer. He plays racquetball, I play hockey. He knows computers, I know the law. He’s a Tiger, I’m a Spartan. He’s a gourmet cook, I love to eat. He says, “ya all” and I say “eh?” And he’s a grandpa and I’m not .. yet.

But here’s what we have in common: a shared Catholic faith, fantastic spouses, beloved children, similar politics, and a taste for beer! I really like this guy! In his kitchen, right above the stove, in large stenciled letters is his mantra, 'It’s All Good.' So I’d say we’re both full of happiness.”

The wedding at Saint Vincent’s Church was spectacular: a bevy of beautiful bridesmaids, a cadre of spiffy groomsmen, a couple of giggling flower girls, a stunning bride and grinning groom presided over by a priest who has known the Jones family since Meghan was a toddler.

Then came the reception, about an hour away at a vineyard set above the lush Missouri countryside, the tour de force of a professional event planner who just happened to be the bride.

It all took place on May 21, 2011. That was the day Harold Camping predicted would be the end of the world. For Tom and Meghan, it was the beginning.

But 270 miles to the West and twenty four hours later, it was indeed the end of the world for over 120 people in Joplin, Missouri.

The ferocious power of Mother Nature turned that town into rubble, snatched babies from their mothers’ arms, threw a three hundred pound patient out of a hospital window and sucked a high school graduate out of the roof of his car.

The juxtaposition of the predicted Rapture, the leveling of Joplin and the wedding of my grandson has sparked a kind of philosophical melancholy in this old judge.

Life ends when it ends. We know not the day nor the hour. Our faith tells us to live each day as though it is our last, leaving no debt unpaid nor duty undone.

Still, it brings a flush of warmth to see young people, good young people with their heads screwed on properly and their hearts in the right place stepping out together into the sunrise of a new day and a new life. Excited. Hopeful. Unafraid.

Makes me think this old earth’s going to last a while longer.

SEVEN ZIP

It didn’t take them very long.

Earlier today, the Supreme Court of Michigan decided the case of Attorney General v Clarke.

It rendered a per curiam opinion. Per curiam. That means, “by the court.’ In other words, unanimously. All seven Justices agreed to dismiss the Attorney General’s request to oust Judge Clarke from the Lansing District Court.

In the process, the Court repudiated the 1983 case of Kelley v Riley, on the ground that its controlling opinion is inconsistent with the constitution of the State of Michigan.

It was front page news in the Lansing State Journal, which noted that the Court consists of four Republicans and three Democrats, and that I had told them a party line vote would demean the Court and make a mockery of the rule of law.

Since they didn't decide to remove Judge Clarke, they didn't have to answer the question of whether they have the power to do it. They didn't have to come face to face with the plain words of the constitution which say they don't have the power to remove judges.

No surprise. Also no surprise that they included a paragraph defending their right to answer that question either way if it evercomes up. Judges don't giveup the gavel very easily, even to the sovereign people.

Bottom line, the case is closed. Judge Clarke stays on the bench. The Good Lord was willin' and the creek didn't rise.

So the Honorable Hugh Clarke can get back to concentrating on the miscreants, the landlords, the tenants, and the hapless DUI defendants who make his job so challenging. And begin to plan his 2012 election campaign.

And I can get back to being a bogie golfer, a harried homeowner, an itinerant grandparent, and a concerned citizen of these United States.

Still, I have to admit that donning the familiar blue suit, hauling a bulging brief case to the courthouse and jousting with the folks in the black robes was an exhilerating exercise for this old warrior.

Nice to know there's still a bit of fire in the belly that isn't just heart burn from eating jalopenos.

WELCOME BACK

I had not argued a case in the Michigan Supreme Court in more than fifty years.

Everything was different. The Courthouse. The security precautions. The people, of course.

And TV cameras, for heaven’s sake. I had been a voice crying in the wilderness a half century ago, urging television in the courtrooms. Now there it was. And I would be on it.

For folks who have never seen a Supreme Court case argued, take a look at:

http://cst.clickstreamtv.net/mpi/cst.html?account=sbm&clip=050311_msc_54a&flashVersion=10&playlist=05_03_11_msc_54a_judge&realVersion=&route=1&cstSessionID=971282&sessionID=M20110510128871BE0F4&server=&speedZone=300&wmpVersion=9&referenceID=&emailCampaignID=&recipientID=&fileID=

Despite my years on the bench, I confess that I was nervous. Chief Justice Bob Young graciously greeted me with “Welcome back.” I was so up tight, I didn’t thank him.

Bad start.

Afterwards, a generous email from an old friend gave me occasion to size up the experience. I told him I was having “litigation remorse.” I should have said this. I should have said that. Why didn’t I think of this? Why didn’t I think of that?

He reminded me that the best jury speeches are addressed to the ceiling of a lawyer’s bedroom on the night after the trial.

Still, mulling over the questions asked by the justices, I can’t help but think that some of them simply didn’t understand the gist of my argument.

Chief Justice Young, for example, asked if I was claiming that the Court could not remove an imposter.

I wish I had answered by pointing out that an imposter is not a judge, and that removing an imposter is not removing a judge.

Suppose, for example, that a judge goes on vacation, and while he is away, his jealous, identical twin brother, dons the robe and starts holding court. The imposter can’t make enforceable decisions. Can’t legally put people in jail. Anyone can challenge him. You don’t need a Quo Warranto action. And when you take the gavel away from him, you are not removing a judge, you are exposing an imposter.

Justice Marilyn Kelly put the case that someone other than Judge Krause might have won the District Court election in November 2010. If Judge Clarke tried to stay on the job after January 1, couldn’t the Court remove him and install the newly elected judge?

I wish I had responded by telling her that when I was Chief Justice there was a judge who kept coming to the office after he lost the election. I told him to clean out his desk and go home. It’s not rocket science. You don’t need a court order to remove somebody from an office they no longer hold.

Justice Zahra wondered what would happen if the new Governor had also appointed someone to the job. Would the Court then have the power to remove Judge Clarke?

Again, I wish I had answered that there is only one judgeship at issue. If there are two claimants, one of them is a judge and the other is not a judge. You can’t remove the judge because the constitution forbids it, and you can’t remove the other claimant because he doesn’t occupy an office from which to be removed.

I did try to remind the Court that even the Attorney general agrees that Hugh Clarke is a sitting District Judge. But I should have pointed out that their own Court Administrator lists Clarke as a judge, monitors his workload, and keeps his judicial statistics.

Arguing the case for the umpteenth time to my bedroom ceiling, I can hear myself asking the justices the crucial question, If the words,’The Supreme Court shall not have the power to remove a judge’do not mean that you can’t remove a judge, what exactly do they mean?

The ceiling doesn’t answer. Maybe the Supreme Court of Michigan will.

ANNIVERSARY REFLECTIONS

It’s that time of year again. On April 28 Polly and I will celebrate our sixtieth wedding anniversary.

I used to wonder if we’d make it to fifty. I’d see all those blurbs in the Sunday papers about folks celebrating their fiftieth anniversaries. Man, they were old. Shriveled up, superannuated relics with canes and aluminum walkers, crooked ties and toothless grins.

Would that be us?

And sixty? Good Lord, does anybody last that long?

Apparently they do. I looked in the paper a couple of weeks ago and there were more sixtieth anniversaries than fiftieths. And doggone if most of them didn’t look pretty damn good.

O.K. So maybe it’s my perspective.

Sometimes when I tell people I have been married for sixty years, they ask in disbelief, “To the same woman?”

Hell no, I say. She’s not the same woman at all. She used to be a pretty young girl, now she’s a beautiful old lady.

I guess that’s part of having a long marriage. You both keep changing. You have to keep falling in love, keep learning about each other. Keep committing and recommitting to the contract.

We’ve been married four times. At age 21, age 46, age 61 and age 71. Same ceremony. Same priest, except for the third time.

We’re not getting married again this year. Thought it might be kind of fun to live in sin for a while.

Son Bill was here for a few days. He brought a stack of DVD’s made from home movies, one of which was of Polly’s sixty-fifth birthday party.

What a treasure.

A black tie dinner at Walnut Hills Country Club with five of our six children and their spouses, except for Ellen who was still single. Son John was living in Minneapolis, and sent his regrets and good wishes.

The rest of them took turns ‘roasting’ the Guest of Honor. It was hilarious then and just as knee slappingly funny today. Except that now there is a touch of bittersweet nostalgia mixed in when I see how we all looked fifteen years ago and realize that yesteryear is only yesterday.

I suppose there are people who have been married a long time, but don’t have children. Or they have one or two kids who moved to California thirty years ago and never came back. But for me it’s all about family. Family meals. Family worship. Family pride. Family fun. Family traditions.

Forty years ago I was helping son Bill, then a pre-teen, to do his Christmas shopping. I stumbled upon a pair of brown jodhpurs. You know, those funny looking English riding breeches. They had been marked down from about thirty dollars. Marked way down. To 19.95. To 9.95. To 4.95. To 1.95. And finally to ten cents! Billy bought them for his sister Peggy.

Needless to say, Christmas morning brought peals of laughter about Peggy’s gift.

Well, the next year, didn’t Peg give them back to Bill. And thus began the great jodhpur exchange. At every large family gathering, somebody gets the riding breeches. They now display an embroidered history of the presentations, which include the traditional trying on and posing for pictures. And of course, the infamous price tag is still attached.

It’s especially challenging when a couple of grandsons who are built like NFL line backers try to squeeze into those ten cent trowsers.

But somehow they do. Because it’s tradition. Because it’s family.

Silly stuff to be sure.

But it’s the stuff that sixty year marriages are made of.

GETTING OUT OF DEBT

I see where President Obama is proposing 4 trillion dollars of debt reduction to compete with the Republicans' push for 5 trillion in spending cuts. Of course, true to his commitment to class warfare, the President’s plan includes taxes on the hated rich people.

They have until May 16 to agree on something. That’s when the 14.6 trillion dollar federal debt limit will have to be raised, if we are going to borrow enough money to pay the obligations that will come due by then.

In short we have to borrow money to pay back money we have already borrowed.

Make sense to you?

Not to me. It’s like owing $10,000 on your VISA card and paying it back by putting it on your MasterCard.

Du?

The federal government, like everyone else, can only get money in one of four ways. It can beg, borrow or steal. Or it can get money the old fashioned way. Earn it.

You and I have to balance our budgets. What comes in must not be less than what goes out. Money that you borrow isn’t income. It is the absence of income. It’s called going in the hole.

You gotta pay it back. And the worst part is that until you do pay it back, the interest piles up.

I hate paying interest and penalties. It always makes me feel like somebody has a gun to my head. In the case of our national debt, the gun is often held by other nations.

How much is this tribute we are obligated to pay to our creditors? Let’s see. A million has six zeros. A billion has nine zeros. A trillion has twelve zeros. So one percent of a trillion – take off two zeros – is a number with ten zeros. Ten billion.

So if we are paying three percent interest on the 14 trillion dollar national debt, we are ponying up 30 x 14 or 420 billion dollars a year in tribute.

That’s just the interest. How much of the principal do we have to come up with?

In December of 2008, the national debt was 10 trillion. Today it’s 14 trillion. That’s a forty percent increase in just over half of Barack Obama’s first term.

Should we worry about it? Will it be a burden on our children and grandchildren? Of course it will. So how can we pay off the debt and get our government on a pay as you go system?

Easy enough. The constitution empowers Congress to coin money. In fact, it is more than a power. It is a duty. Just like setting the standard of weights and measures.

Can we crank out enough gold dollars to pay off 14 trillion in debt? Not hardly. Even at $1,400 an ounce, we probably don’t have enough in Fort Knox. And just shipping that much hard money to our creditors would be a monumental task. Anyway, who would want to make a monthly mortgage payment with gold coins?

But the constitution doesn’t require gold, and doesn’t define the word “coin.”

So how about this: the feds start issuing electronic money. Plastic cash cards loaded with 100, 1,000, 10,000 or 100,000 dollars. Easy to use. Easy to carry. Can’t be counterfeited. Program them with an LED window that displays the balance on the card when you pinch it.

The U.S. dollar is the international reserve currency. That means other countries use our dollars to pay each other when they do business. Plastic cash cards would work as well if not better than federal reserve notes.

Would it cause inflation?

Maybe. But sooner or later the fiddler has to be paid.

WHOSE CHOICE?

An exchange of emails with a friend got me started on this.

The abortion issue, labeled Pro Life or Pro Choice by the interest groups, remains the most significant cultural divide in American life. Viewed by both sides as a moral issue, it leaves little room for anyone to be 'moderate.'

I have always approached the question as a legal issue. Admittedly, my personal aversion to abortion may influence my legal opinion, but, in the tradition of the judiciary, I try to think it through without reference to my subjective opinion.

Prior to 1973, every state in the American union had some kind of legislation on the subject of abortion. Both criminal statutes and laws regulating the practice of medicine prohibited assisting or causing a woman to miscarry.

So far as I have seen, these laws were all addressed to the person causing the miscarriage and not to the pregnant woman.

In the decade prior to 1973 there were efforts in several states to liberalize the abortion statutes. Most would make it legal for a woman to have an abortion in case of rape or incest, or if the pregnancy endangered her life or physical health.

The entry of the Supreme Court of the United States into this sensitive moral and political thicket was, in my opinion, a serious departure from the proper constitutional role of the court. The opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackman, has been criticized from both left and right.

Much has been said and written by scholars on both sides. No one has ever suggested that any citizen who voted to ratify the U.S. Constitution or any of its amendments had the remotest intention to restrict the power of the states to legislate with respect to abortion.

Roe v Wade was an unquestioned usurpation of legislative power by the Supreme Court. It would be easy enough for the court to return the matter to the state legislatures, but unhappily, the Pro Choice people are dead set against allowing the voters to have any Choice in the matter.

The real mischief of Roe v Wade is that it legalizes abortion as an alternative method of birth control. Blackman said the decision should be left to the woman and her doctor. That line was supposed to suggest that abortion is a medical procedure, performed for medical reasons.

The fact is otherwise. Doctors who perform abortions make their living performing abortions. Pregnant women are their clients. Abortion doctors are hardly a restraining influence. If anything, they encourage the procedure that puts money in their pockets.

The result is that a healthy fetus has less protection in America than a healthy liver or gall bladder. No medical necessity needs to be shown. Abortion is completely optional. Like a haircut or a pedicure.

So there it lies. America has a liberal abortion culture, not by Choice, but by the dictate of unelected judges. The long range political consequences, especially as they impact the declining, morbid birth rate in the United States will probably have to play out before the Justices undo what they have wrought.

That's the way I see it.

THE BLOODY QURAN

Today’s Wall Street Journal carries this story on page A12:

KABUL—A frenzied mob incensed by a Quran-burning-ceremony
in Florida overran the United Nations office in northern Afghanistan’s
largest city on Friday, killing at least seven foreigners and several
Afghans, U.N. and Afghan officials said.

There’s not a lot that can be said in defense of Pastor Terry Jones who came up with the idea of promoting “Burn a Quran Day” as a way of dramatizing opposition to the spread of Islam.

Criticism of his idea came from all over. Politicians, military commanders, civic and religious leaders all joined to condemn it and Jones himself ultimately backed off. For a while.

But he just couldn’t leave it alone. On March 20, in a small Gainesville, Florida church known as the Dove World Outreach Center, Jones’ colleague Pastor Wayne Sapp lit a kerosene soaked copy of the Quran with a barbeque match and 30 people watched it burn.

The insane, fanatic and tragic consequences were predictable. As a matter of fact, one of the very reasons why Jones and his ilk are so opposed to the Quran is that it has been interpreted to justify and even encourage bloodthirsty enforcement of Islamic law.

So now Pandora’s box has popped open. Muslim leaders call for the prosecution of Jones as a ‘war criminal.’ Anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-American sentiment is bubbling up all over Afghanistan, and no doubt it will spread throughout the Arab world.

And here in the U.S. we are not exactly edified by the slaughter of United Nations officials as a means of protesting the burning of a book.

Debate rages on the Internet. On the one hand there are the trigger happy red neck types who say we should nuc the whole Middle East back to the stone age and build an oil pipeline from the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Mexico.

On the other extreme are the neo-isolationists who say we should bring all our troops home, build windmills, nuclear reactors, and solar panel highways. And drive electric cars.

Even Pastor Jones ought to realize that burning a book will not snuff out the words. Ideas live in the minds and hearts of human beings. The real contest of the twenty-first century is between Western Civilization and Islam.

There was time when Western Civilization was called Christendom. Eastern and Western Europe, North and South America were dotted with Christian churches in every city and village. And people went to them.

It was a culture of faith, and hope and charity. Of doing good and avoiding evil. Of marriage, family and hard work.

But no more. What is endemic in the West today is better described as multi-cultural hedonism.

My Dad used to say that the best evangelism was good example.

I ask myself whether we can hope to win the hearts and minds of Muslims by the example we show on our television, in our motion pictures, on our Internet.

I ask myself whether we can hope to persuade a burgeoning population of Muslims that it would be in their best interest – that they would be happier – if instead of spawning large families, they were to embrace birth control, abortion and homosexuality.

I wonder if people who block traffic during Friday prayers by prostrating themselves shoulder to shoulder across the highway by the hundreds – by the thousands – are likely ever to buy into a culture which bans the teaching of the Quran in public schools, or forbids the words of Muhammad from being inscribed above the courthouse door.

We have to condemn the criminal insanity of the mindless mob that slaughters non believers. But Hamid Karzai’s government isn’t going to arrest or prosecute anyone.

So what are we to do?

Tough question for Christian folk. What would Jesus do?