Today’s eipsode of WallBuilders Live radio program was dedicated to lamenting the tragedy of Tom DeLay’s conviction for money laundering with DeLay’s BFF Rick Scarobough, who says that he takes solace in knowing that this nation will one day be called to judgment by God:
Scarborough: Tom DeLay is a very close personal friend of mine. I got to know Congressman DeLay when I was pastoring for twelve years in his district. I found him to be a genuine, Godly man and consequently when this indictment came down and subsequent trial began back on November the first I determined that I was going to sit at his side, minister to her and his wife. And consequently I made trips every week for three straight weeks to Austin to monitor the trial and prayed with the family. And I must confess, at least from my perspective, we’ve had a grave injustice carried forth that I pray God will intervene and correct.
Rick Green: You know I ask you first, Pastor, before we get into the details, you’re someone who loves this country like we do – when you see this sort of travesty of justice and abuse of the judicial system, how do you maintain hope?
Scarborough: Well, I keep my eyes focused on Jesus. I know biblically there comes a day when a nation that tramples under foot the word of God finally is called to judgment.
Later, David Barton rails against the fact that DeLay was not allowed to choose his own jury so that he could be judged by a bunch of consevative Christians who could have then ignored the law and found him not guilty, just as the Founding Fathers intended:
Green: I’ll ask you the same question I asked Rick: how do you get peace when you look at these kinds of abuses of what should be the best system in the world.
Barton: Well, it’s a problem and one of the things that has happened is there is a check and balance here that did not get used, and that check and balance was the jury system.
And the judges have so corrupted the jury system … let me give you an example: we have all these cases from the Founding Era of jurors and you always here this thing, a “jury of your peers.” Do you know what that literally meant? It meant that the guy who was on trial got to pick the people who sat on the jury … But now we say “we’ve got to get somebody who doesn’t know you personally, we’ve got to get somebody who has only read the news account story of you – what [George] Soros and Media Matters and everything else” – and so that’s a corruption of the jury system.
We used to allow jurors, under the Constitution, they decided both law and fact and we don’t allow them to decide law any more. And that used to be a check and balance upon judges but in 1895 the US Supreme Court said “oh, juries can’t look at the law anymore, they can only look at the fact.”
Green: Only our high and might judges can decide that … so what we do is basically we give the juries, they’re basically boxed in, you can answer yes or no to this question and that’s it.
I mean, it never should have gone to trial in the first place and then on the other end you ended up with a jury that wasn’t a jury of his peers and was only allowed to answer the one question.
Barton: That’s right, so that’s the abuse that happened. this is a pretty good example of what happens when you get away from that Constitutional guarantee of due process. The Constitutional guarantee would have made this really easy, but under that way the courts have reinterpreted the Fourth through the Eighth Amendments, all that Due Process stuff, this is where DeLay had so much trouble.
