Posts Tagged → Supreme
The yaw in America’s orbit
Politically speaking, for a very long time, at least since 1865, America has had a pretty stable orbit. We circle a very dense, heavy, socially generous capitalistic economic core encased in a semi-plastic Constitution, and sometimes we swing out into the darkness of one far end of the solar system or another. But America has always returned back to the middle after those elliptical soirees, very often pulled back in by the power of the US Supreme Court. Because the US Supreme Court has always always always been the guardians of order and individual rights vs. a power-hungry government.
For all of its flaws and mistakes and legislating from the bench over the years, the US Supreme Court has always been kind of the center of America’s political system. A sort of brake sometimes, or a set of loose then taut reins other times, but always gently steering and operating with the deep respect of the governed. If the US Supreme Court said so, then it must have been concluded with the greatest of careful pondering, most Americans have always thought. However, with two decisions out of the Court this week, the Court’s central stabilizing arrangement is now at an open and notorious end.
The Court is yet one more government organ to now force-feed Americans their new role as subjects being ruled from the top down, no longer free citizens being governed by people we trust and approve of with the citizenry’s consent.
Our US Supreme Court is exerting great yaw upon the nation’s orbit. Which is to say the Court is not spinning or moving in a smooth track, and is therefore exerting destabilizing forces upon the body politic. Its latest decisions indicate a great deal of turmoil inside the Court and out. And the Court’s two recent decisions demonstrate that turmoil emanates from the Court purposefully engaging in overtly political acts, not based on wisdom and due process, but on purely short-term political desires.
The one decision is to dismiss the two main lawsuits from the stolen election of 2020, one from Pennsylvania and one from Texas. Back in December, the Court said that the US President or his assigns\ representatives did not have standing to make these cases before the Court. In other words, the sitting US President was not important enough to argue his case before the Court, which is a ridiculous position on its face. And now the Court has said the two cases are moot because the question has passed with the January 20th swearing in of corrupt fraud Joe Biden. In other words, The People can’t win either way with this Court. In no way was the Court going to hear these critically important cases, because the evidence of wrongdoing to steal the 2020 election is overwhelming. The Court wants to keep a lid on all that, Constitutional procedure and government credibility be damned.
The second decision is to grant New York politicians access to President Trump’s tax returns. This is something that has never happened before to any president or ex-president, and it is part of an ongoing public effort by the political establishment to utterly destroy President Donald Trump, both in and out of office, and his supporters. Like all of the other political decisions made in recent months, the precedent this decision sets can and will swing both ways. As I write this, some enterprising DA in East Succotash America is looking at ways to get Barack Hussein Obama’s tax returns, and Joe Biden’s, too, and to use them to pursue these two criminals to the ends of the earth.
Oh, the precedents that are being set!
One can picture in the mind’s eye the formerly off-stage narrator suddenly forcefully step forth onto the stage and address the audience directly for dramatic effect:
“But the blade cuts both ways! But such is the single-minded hatred for anti-establishment Trump held by the political establishment that they are blinded by what self-destructive forces their decisions are setting in motion. America’s orbit yaws this way and that, piloted as it is by blind hatred and ambition…”
No nation run on the concept of self-rule like America can withstand such open and notorious purposefully arbitrary and capricious decision making as we are witnessing from the US Supreme Court. Their decisions are disconnected from every law, custom, norm, and Constitutional principle that anchors American government to the nation’s people. Arbitrary and capricious decision making do not jibe with democratic self-rule; one must prevail over the other. One was created to stop the other. They are mutually exclusive, and yet the Court demands that we accept arbitrary and capricious as the new norm.
The US Supreme Court is willfully throwing its integrity and credibility overboard, and becoming yet another failed American institution seeking to simply rule the masses with brute force.
Despite housing the supposed greatest American political historians, the Court seems to intentionally kick sand in the face of The People. Even as The People are gathering their pitchforks and torches, these blind political elites deliberately mis-steer a path of self-government that yaws this way and that, moving America off course by design, throwing it off of its Constitutional orbit, deviating from the straight and just trajectory America has been on for 244 years. As an object yaws in its orbit, it becomes destabilized and eventually thrown off course forever. In nautical and aeronautical terms, America is now beginning to spin out of control, going off its rocker, going off course.
These dramatic moments are the powerful stuff of dramatic plays, told to Western audiences for at least three thousand years to teach pointed lessons from past mistakes, for a reason. And so one must ask, Whose skull will Hamlet II hold in the eventually inevitable tragic play that will be done years hence to describe the obviously avoidable downfall of the first American republic?
[Yaw: To swerve off course momentarily or temporarily; to move unsteadily; weave; to deviate temporarily from a straight course. If a ship or plane yaws too much, its deviations will become permanent and fatal to its enterprise]
Tyranny by Ten
This Tuesday, two and a half days ago, the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals created a new law about guns and gun ownership in America out of thin air and completely contradicting recent US Supreme Court decisions the lower courts are bound to follow
If you want to see why citizens’ faith in the judiciary branch has declined, this bizarre decision is the best latest example.
It is gross over-reach far exceeding the court’s authority, and nullifying all of the judicial precedent litigated and decided before by the highest court.
Recall that judges cannot make up law.
They are fully bound by precedent.
They cannot make up policies.
They cannot come to a conclusion that is outside the subject of what has been litigated in front of them.
They cannot second-guess Congress.
They cannot ask what personal motives were behind a president’s executive order.
It does not matter what a judge personally thinks. None of this is supposed to enter into a judge’s ruling. When it does, the ruling is meaningless garbage.
Judges can only interpret the laws that are passed by Congress and signed by the President, or the state equivalent. That is it. That is their sole scope and ability.
At their most precise and honest moment, judges simply determine if a law is Constitutional, or not, or if it needs to go back to the state or federal legislative branch for re-work.
Brazen activism like this week’s decision serves only to undermine the judiciary, not strengthen it, because people will either utterly ignore these wayward judges, or they will seek to have them removed from their office, for good cause. Or both.
I myself do not feel bound by this illegal decision, and I will not comply with it no matter who says I must. These ten judges-gone-wild do not outweigh the collective decisions of the populace. If this court wants my guns, the authors of this decision can come to my home and try to take them away.
Come and (try to) take them!
In this particular instance of judicial malfeasance, ten of the court’s fourteen judges decided on their own that a new legal test was needed, a test that had never been used before by Congress, by the framers, the Constitution, or prior courts.
These ten judges decided to call it the “weapons of war” test, and they simply state that the Second Amendment never intended for American citizens to possess “weapons of war,” which according to these judges include the basic AR-15 rifles that are commonly used to hunt coyotes every week across the nation. Never mind that this new test would have eliminated from their personal possession the very military grade guns the American Patriots used to defeat the British.
But obviously logic is not of concern to these judges. The language of the majority decision and supporting decision is florid, full of political and emotional hyperbole, uses sophomoric logic and impolitic language (“the American people deserve a break”), and is simply disconnected from Constitutional text or legal precedent.
It is the equivalent of my kids saying “So, there!” in an argument.
But wait, there’s more!
Beyond being merely political, the majority bizarrely state that the decision is consistent with the US Supreme Court’s Heller decision, when it is in fact completely contradictory. Talk about shades of Orwell’s “1884,” where up is down, black is white, etc.
This is not a legal decision, it is a political decision. It is a bold, defiant “I dare ya!” act by ten radical politicians wearing sombre black robes. And it is not just about guns. This decision is about rogue, out-of-control judges destroying the fabric of our Republic, which was not designed to turn over all issues to the judiciary, as if they make our every decision for us. This court throws the whole delicate machine of democracy out of kilter.
These judges are anti-democracy, plain and simple. They want a certain policy outcome, and because they cannot get it legitimately, legally, through the established legislative process, they simply want to wave a magic wand and make it so.
As much as this illegal decision shocks me, I do have to thank these judges, because they have outed themselves. By engaging in such egregious over-reach, illegally reaching deep into the realms of policy and law, they have willingly exposed themselves as frauds deserving of the most serious correction our system of government allows for – removal from the bench.
Now it is up to those American citizens who want to ‘drain the swamp’ and reclaim American government so that it serves We The People, to remove these anti-democracy activists from their sacred judicial roles. We can push to have them impeached or removed administratively.
Either way will do. Tyranny by ten cannot stand. We the People demand our rights.
Division this close means widening social fractures
By Josh First
Legislating from the bench, a liberal majority on the US Supreme Court once again discards jurisprudence and picks up the hammer and saw of simple policy making.
Beginning their opinion with a personal attack on religious Americans and other traditionalists who thought that thousands of years of human history didn’t need to be tossed out a window, at least not by five people wearing ominous black robes, the Court said nothing about law or the basis of law in America. In fact, the majority opinion refers almost not at all to the Defense of Marriage Act which it overturned.
These are the same four or five Americans who do not believe that the Second Amendment to the Constitution means what it plainly says and always meant in practice among citizens since the nation’s founding. They are wildly out of touch with the law they are supposed to be upholding and protecting.
America is badly served by this sort of law-making. Why have a US Congress and an Executive branch if five unelected people can make something up themselves? And a lot of Americans aren’t impressed enough to start following this sort of top-down, Smarties-Know-Better-Than-You governance. Courts are supposed to be reluctant to toss out entire laws, because it demonstrates that the people, the citizenry, were just plain wrong. But in a Republic like America, government, and justices, operate only at the will of the governed.
That government that governs the least maintains the most credibility and fealty. Sweeping government decisions like today’s judicial legislation deeply alienate citizens from the government they believe is supposed to represent them. Remanding DOMA back to the states would have made the most sense, because marriage is a state issue.
But then again, Americans are locked in what is becoming a quiet civil war about what America is and how it is supposed to be, and the Court is becoming a friction point. These views are incompatible. One side wants adherence to the Constitution and founding principles easily obtained from the founding documents, while the other wants power through massive, intrusive, spying, monitoring, crushing, incarcerating, penalizing government. Apparently, some modern ideas are so good that they must be made mandatory…in other words, resistance to them is punishable, despite real, legitimate disagreement.
The biggest concern I have is how the First Amendment’s protection of religious liberty is going to square up with this radical holding. Religious liberty is the hallmark of American freedoms. But can a Mormon minister be breaking some law if he declines to marry a same-sex couple? If it’s yes, and he is punished, will some states fight back by jailing the same-sex couples who wed out-of-state, but who then become incarcerated in states that criminalize same-sex marriage?
All it takes is for one governor to state that he will disregard this holding for the whole thing to boomerang back on the Court. American democracy requires little screwdrivers, but the alleged Great Brains on the Court have just used a sledgehammer. The shockwaves have only begun.