December 21, 2006
Virgil Be Good(e) II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:55 PM EST I certainly agree with Joshua Zeitz that Rep. Virgil Goode is the hands-down winner of the Congressional Moron of the Month award, a title for which there is always much competition on both sides of the aisle. For starters, Rep. Goode might want to take a look at Article VI of the Constitution, which flatly forbids religious tests for holding office.
However I might add that I am not much of a fan of Keith Ellison. I couldn’t care less that he’s a convert to Islam, although that is not a step I am ever likely to take. But he has had in the not-too-distant past far too cozy relationships with the likes of Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam and other unsavory types. Ellison’s district covers Minneapolis, and the very left Minneapolis Star-Tribune resolutely avoided doing its journalistic duty to investigate these ties during the campaign. However Power Line (www.powerlineblog.com) has covered the story like a rug (just search on Keith Ellison).
One thing puzzles me in Mr. Zeitz’s post. In his interesting history on the removal of Jewish disabilities in Britain, he refers to the prime minister who finally got rid of the requirement that members of Parliament take an oath “on the true faith of a Christian,” as “Tory Prime Minister Edward Stanley.” That is technically correct, of course, but he is much better known to history as the earl of Derby, which title he had held since the death of his father, the thirteenth earl, in 1851, shortly before he became prime minister for the first time. He had had the courtesy title of Lord Stanley since the death of his grandfather the twelfth earl in 1834, and had sat in the Lords under that title since 1844, thanks to a wonderfully named legal device called a “writ of acceleration,” which allowed politically useful heirs to peerages to sit in the Lords during their fathers’ lifetimes.
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