Who is David Sentelle?

Sentelle, in particular, epitomizes the type of arch reactionaries who have in recent years been elevated to the federal judiciary. He began his political career as a protégé of Jesse Helms, the North Carolina senator and former segregationist whose extreme right-wing views for years relegated him to the fringes of the US political establishment, until the general rightward trajectory of official American politics made his fascistic inclinations “respectable.”

Sentelle was appointed to the US District Court for the Western District of North Carolina by Ronald Reagan in 1985. He was then appointed by Reagan to the US Court of Appeals for the DC District in 1987, replacing fellow reactionary Antonin Scalia, who moved on to the US Supreme Court.

The DC Court of Appeals is considered the second most influential court in the US, behind only the Supreme Court, and in his 20 years on the court Sentelle has consistently used his position to promote right-wing positions. He has, in particular, advocated a narrow interpretation of the US Constitution’s Commerce Clause so as to attack government regulation of business on environmental and other matters.

In 1990, Sentelle joined in a ruling voiding the felony convictions of Oliver North and John Poindexter for their roles in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which officials in the Reagan administration were exposed as having secretly sold arms to Iran in order to illegally fund Contra death squads in Nicaragua who were seeking to overthrow the left-nationalist Sandinista government.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/feb2007/sent-f24.shtml