Judicial Tyranny & We the People

[Jim Delaney]

With the polls showing a very close presidential race, fears are mounting among patriots that if Obama is re-elected very liberal justices will be appointed to fill the vacancies of at least  two retiring justices, one of whom may be Justice Scalia, a fairly reliable conservative jurist.

Can you imagine the damage done should two more Kagans or Sotomayors be appointed and a 5-4 or 6-4 liberal SCOTUS rears its ugly head? With the judiciary in his back pocket, Obama's "fundamental transformation of the United States" might well prove be a fairly leisurely cakewalk.
But, not so fast!

First, for the libs to take over SCOTUS, the Senate would have to remain in Progressive hands, an unsettling prospect which diminishes with each unemployment report and blazing American consulate. For that reason alone, patriots had best pull out all stops to ensure a Republican/Tea Party takeover of the Senate this year.

That said, in all honesty, I am always flummoxed, and not a little disappointed, when I hear patriots feverishly warn against and whine about a liberal takeover of the Supreme Court, asserting that a liberal-dominated court will inevitably result in more socialism and statism.

Well, in truth, with or without a liberal majority on the bench, the judicial world as we now know it isn't a lot to celebrate.

 

Yes, over the years liberal justices have done incalculable harm, even more so than self-identified conservative judges. Years of faulty and revisionist case law, to which both schools have often been a party, is ample proof of the harm already perpetrated by a runaway judiciary inconsistently faithful to the original meaning and intent of the Constitution.

 

But let's not forget that OUR permitting the States to routinely submit to the federal judiciary to fairly settle constitutional disputes with the federal government (a surefire recipe for disaster), and OUR allowing the omniscient courts to imperiously overrule voter referendums, thus imposing  THEIR own will on the people, have also materially contributed to the breakdown in constitutional order. So, who's really at fault? What is the proximate cause of this breakdown in the constitutional order?  We are. Overweaning liberal judges are merely a symptom of OUR failure.

My point is that the harm occasioned by judicial overreach--whether by liberal or conservative jurists--can be effectively thwarted IF IF IF the States and We the People assert their 9th and 10th Amendment constitutional powers.

 

Contrary to the opinion of many brainwashed law students, it is the U.S. Constitution--NOT the "Supreme" Court--which is the supreme law of the land, and both the 9th and 10th Amendments,  both very much essential components of that Constitution, were intended to ensure constitutional supremacy, balance of powers and liberty.

When SCOTUS overreaches its authority with unconstitutional rulings/opinions, then the States, per the 9th and the 10th Amendments, are legally and morally obliged to summarily nullify, aka render null, void and unenforcable, those rulings. In this regard, the framers' intention was crystal clear.

The Constitution works brilliantly to safeguard liberty, our core principles of checks and balances and separation of powers, but ONLY if it is honored and enforced by all parties to the federal contract we call the Constitution. And if the States, equal parties to that contract, are too weak-kneed or corrupted by federal handouts to honor the supreme law of the land, that being the Constitution and no other, then it is encumbent upon We the People, the final arbiters of what is and what is not constitutional, to assert our central role as the guardian of the Constitution. If that means nationwide well-coordinated civil disobedience, then so be it! If it means Tea Parties marching on and, yes, occupying our State houses to "convince" them to assert their authority over a runaway federal government, so be it. No more pussy-footing, no more whining. Going forward, only meaningful a-c-t-i-o-n will suffice.

Let this sink in: only with the single-minded enforcement of the 9th and 10th Amendments by the States and/or the People can our constitutional republic be restored. And the ball is clearly in OUR court.

In short, folks, we need to get very seriously organized if Obama is re-elected. But we also need to get organized even if Romney is elected. The growth of the imperial presidency, to say nothing of the Supreme Court's imperiousness, screams for remedial grassroots action.

In truth, the Supreme Court, a servant of the central government, has become an essentially unbridled, unaccountable, black-robed oligarchy, beholden to its federal creators alone and driven by personal, political and ideological agendas. Tragically, the court's faithfulness to the Constitution has long ago dissipated. Revealingly, Gov. Hughes, who served as Chief Justice from 1930-1941, asserted that "We are under a Constitution, BUT the Constitution is what the judges say it is." Wow! And that pretty much sums up where we are now. Without meaningful grassroots opposition, judicial supremacy will continue to effectively trump constitutional supremacy and, in so doing, the judiciary will continue to dangerously undermine the very underpinnings of our republic.

For me, THE burning question is this: by our disengagement, submissiveness, benign neglect, or by our merely hoping that the problem will eventually go away, will we continue to permit the foundational collapse of what remains of our constitutional republic? I'll let you answer that.

"If the Federal Government should overpass the just bounds of its authority and make a tyrannical use of its powers, the PEOPLE, whose creature it is, must appeal to the standard they have formed [the Constitution], and take such measure to redress the injury to the Constitution  as the exigency may suggest and prudence justify." Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper No. 33.

"I know of no safe despository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; this is the true corrective of abuses of Constitutional powers." Thomas Jefferson

"The great object of my fear is the federal judiciary. That body, like gravity, ever acting with noiselesss foot and unalarming advance, gaining ground step by step and holding what it gains, is engulfing insidiously the state governments into the jaws of that which feeds them; the germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal judiciary." Thomas Jefferson