Among the lowlights of the confirmation hearings for Eric Holder this week was a jaw-dropping endorsement of torture by Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). Having watched one too many "ticking time bomb" scenarios on the Fox series 24, Cornyn asked the would-be Attorney General if he "would still refuse to condone aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding to get that information." But as the record shows, John Cornyn is an aggressive advocate of illicit violence not just against terrorism suspects, but towards American judges as well.
Of course, many of the leading lights in the Republican Party have it made clear that judicial intimidation is now an acceptable part of conservative discourse and political strategy. And Cornyn, himself ironically a former Texas Supreme Court Justice, has been at the forefront of GOP advocacy of violence towards members of the bench whose rulings part ways with conservative orthodoxy.
Back in 2005, Cornyn was one of the GOP standard bearers in the conservative fight against so-called "judicial activism" in the wake of the Republicans' disastrous intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair. On April 4th, Cornyn took to the Senate floor to issue a not-too-thinly veiled threat to judges opposing his reactionary agenda. Just days after the murders of judges in Chicago and Atlanta, Cornyn offered his endorsement of judicial intimidation:

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country...And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence."

(As it turns out, Cornyn was merely echoing the words of the indicted former House Majority Leader and fellow Texan Tom Delay. On March 31st, 2005 Delay thundered in response to the consistent rulings in favor of Michael Schiavo by all federal and state court judges involved, "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior, but not today.")
Facing criticism for his remarks seemingly endorsing right-wing retribution against judges, Cornyn held his ground. "I didn't make the link," he said on Fox News Sunday. "It was taken out of context," adding sarcastically, "I regret it was taken out of context and misinterpreted."
Of course, there can be no misinterpreting John Cornyn's knee-jerk defenses of President Bush's regimes of illegal domestic surveillance and detainee torture. As news of the NSA's illicit warrantless wiretapping became public in December 2005, Cornyn was among the first Republicans to spit out the GOP's "give me death" defense:

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

So it came as no surprise Thursday that Senator Cornyn demanded Barack Obama's attorney general designate Eric Holder answer a hypothetical question about a ticking time bombs and torture. Cornyn's enthusiasm for the waterboarding was clear throughout:

CORNYN: You would still refuse to condone aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding to get that information, which would, under my hypothetical, save perhaps tens of thousands of lives...
HOLDER: ...I think your hypothetical assumes a premise that I'm not willing to concede.
CORNYN: I know you don't like my hypothetical.
HOLDER: No, the hypothetical's fine; the premise that underlies it I'm not willing to accept, and that is that waterboarding is the only way that I could get that information from those people.
CORNYN: Assume that it was.
HOLDER: [Laughs] Given the knowledge that I have about other techniques and what I've heard from retired admirals and generals and FBI agents, there are other ways in a timely fashion that you can get information out of people that is accurate and will produce useable intelligence. And so it's hard for me to accept or to answer your hypothetical without accepting your premise. And in fact, I don't think I can do that.

While Eric Holder signaled the Obama administration's refusal to violate the Geneva Conventions, President Bush has already violated U.S. and international law with the use of waterboarding and other interrogation techniques. As is now well known to all, Bush and Cornyn's shared fetish for detainee torture has not only done little to produce actionable intelligence, it has compromised terror prosecutions.
As for the right-wing war on judges encouraged by John Cornyn, it apparently has had its desired effect. In March 2006, Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg reported they had received death threats the previous year. In June 2007, Judge Reggie Walton, who presided over the trial of Scooter Libby and now serves on the FISA court, similarly acknowledged threats to himself and his family.
At the end of the day, Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin summed up John Cornyn's waterboarding advocacy during the Holder hearings, "I understand Senator Cornyn's questions," adding, "They are questions that anyone who watches Jack Bauer on '24' would ask." As for Cornyn's grotesque attempts to intimidate state and federal judges as a standard Republican political tactic, Justice O'Connor expressed her contempt for lawmakers who were "creating a culture" that threatens the credibility of the rule of law:

"It gets worse. It doesn't help when a high-profile senator suggests a 'cause-and-effect connection' [between controversial rulings and subsequent acts of violence.]"

O'Connor's assessment of John Cornyn and his ilk, it turned out, was not hypothetical.