Supreme Court: Faithful Guardian of the Constitution? Nope!

[Jim Delaney]

On the grounds that Justice Thomas's wife is involved with the Tea Party movement, Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker recently demanded that Justice Thomas recuse himself from sitting on a case challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare's "individual mandate", the lynchpin of the health care leviathan.

True to hypocritical liberal form, Toobin studiously neglected any mention of Justice Elena Kagan's conflict of interest occasioned by her having worked on the issue in the Justice Department before her appointment as Associate Justice. Another case of selective lib indignity.

The liberal strategy is embarrassingly obvious: eliminate conservative judicial threats to their activist agenda before the case is reviewed.

For me, such deceitful attempts to manipulate the court underscores a much greater concern--a more fundamental concern--that being the menacing power and corruption of the Supreme Court itself..

For years, SCOTUS has substituted "constitutional supremacy" with "judicial supremacy", surely a recipe for constitutional disaster. To better illustrate this dangerous transformation, during the Roosevelt years Chief Justice Hughes arrogantly asserted that "We are under a Constittution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is." Wow! But at least he was honest about the his own and the court's authoritarian predilection.

These nine unelected, unaccountable, life-long tenured, black-robed oligarchs, more often than not driven by their political dispositions than by their faithfulness to the Constitution itself, have exercised far too much influence over our Republic's direction. Relying on politically driven and often arbitrary rulings, the dissembling of the Constitution over the years has been unrelenting and inexorable. By the court's failure to faithfully abide by its sworn oath to uphold the Constitution as the fundamental law of the land, they have all but wrecked the constitutional framework so carefully crafted by our founders.

Owing to this unrestrained erosion of our constitutional foundations by the Supreme Court itself, I no longer respect what this gaggle of mortal "super legislators" deign to be constitutional or unconstitutional.

In short, SCOTUS has become an unbridled and overzealous power unto itself--NOT what the founders intended at all. And if SCOTUS again blows it by imperiously granting its blessings to the "individual mandate", then it is encumbent upon the States and "we the people" to assert our 10th Amendment right and duty to nullify or otherwise ignore the ruling. For as Alexander Hamilton explained, just as an unconstitutional act of the legislative body is null and void, it should be clear that an unconstitutional edict by the Supreme Court is equally invalid. .

We must remember that the founders intended that "we the people"--not SCOTUS or any of the other branches of government--are THE final arbiters of what is and what is not constitutional. But, if we continue to routinely yield to judicial, executive and legislative overreach, we have only ourselves to blame for the calamity which will surely follow.

A final note: just as the founders intended, Justice Thomas has proven to be a faithful defender of the original meaning and intent of the Constitution. For this reason, he has my unwavering support and respect.

Rule of Thumb: whenever a liberal "living constitutionalist" attacks a judge, in this case Justice Thomas, you can be sure that the victim of that attack is a person patriotic Americans should enthusiastically rally around.