To Holmes law was simply an embodiment of the ends and purposes of a society at a given point in its history.

~ G. Edward White

The law does not attempt to see men as God sees them.

~ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

When Jonah Goldberg wrote in his 2007 book, “Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning,” about the existential religious and intellectual discrimination in the law today, he used as his principle figure Harvard professor Laurence Tribe. Goldberg wrote that, “Laurence Tribe, America’s leading liberal constitutional lawyer, argued in the Harvard Law Review in 1978 that religious views were inherently superstitious and hence less legitimate than ‘secular’ ones.”

This diabolical idea of systematically disenfranchising Christians’ constitutional rights and belittling America’s original Judeo-Christian worldview isn’t unique to professor Tribe nor to history, but in modern times these ideas have a historical link to one of the greatest icons of liberal and progressive jurisprudence – Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841-1935).

Exclaiming a Darwinian evolutionary zeitgeist typical of the Progressive Age, Holmes remarked in a 1926 letter to John C.H. Wu:

I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or to a grain of sand. I believe that our personality is a cosmic ganglion; just as when certain rays meet and cross there is white light at the meeting point, but the rays go on after the meeting as they did before, so, when certain other streams of energy cross at the meeting point, the cosmic ganglion can frame a syllogism. or wag its tail.

In an earlier column, I wrote about the virtual cult status and totalizing scope of Holmes’ jurisprudence on today’s academics, lawyers, judges, politicians, legislators, intellectuals and radical groups on the left:

The influence of Holmes on the law, courts and society is universal. For example, academics like Carl Becker’s historicism/relativism and Charles Beard, whose Marxist zeitgeist and materialistic model of class conflict acknowledged Holmes’ social Darwinist ideas. Together these men influenced generations of American academics and historians like Richard Hofstadter, psychologists and educators like John Dewey, scientists, intellectuals, judges (Richard Posner, Ginsburg, Breyer), lawyers (L. Tribe, C. Sunstein), politicians and virtually all of today’s leftist pressure groups, as they are in some way indebted to the ideas of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Legal scholar G. Edward White, in his pathbreaking 1976 book, “The American Judicial Tradition,” wrote of this iconic jurist: To Holmes law was simply an embodiment of the ends and purposes of a society at a given point in its history. Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a Supreme Court justice from 1902-32. To demonstrate how omnipresent the cult of progressivism was at the turn of the 20th century, it wasn’t a Democrat who appointed Holmes to the Supreme Court, but the venerated Republican Theodore Roosevelt, America’s first progressive president, the man whose image stands astride for the ages at Mount Rushmore. It was this man (whom incidentally I would replace with Reagan’s likeness at Mount Rushmore) who in 1902 appointed Holmes to our nation’s highest court, and virtually all the Republicans went along with this travesty of justice.

To this day the Supreme Court hasn’t been right since that appointment 109 years ago, as five of the nine sitting justices on the Supreme Court trace their judicial legacy directly to Justice Holmes.

By 1900, after 40 years of society being utterly beguiled and infected with the pseudo-scientific lies and sophistic propaganda of Darwin, Marx and Nietzsche, the few dissenting voices of reason were ignored or, like today’s tea-party movement, ridiculed as anti-scientific, hatemongers or right-wing, conservative extremists. When Holmes wrote in his 1881 progressive cult classic, “The Common Law,” that, “The life of law has not been logic; it has been experience,” professor White interpreted: “Justice Holmes’ use of the word ‘logic’ to mean the formalistic, religion-based logic that reasoned downward syllogistically from assumed truths about the universe; the proposed counter-system was ‘experience,’ the changing ‘felt necessities’ that reflected current social values and were altered by time and circumstances. …” Leftist academics like Tribe refer to this idea as a “living constitution” derivative of America’s second progressive president, Woodrow Wilson (1913-21).

Between 1870-1935 Holmes was the key figure who helped transform American culture away from reliance on the founders who believed in transcendent principles based on God, the Bible and natural law, to the vague world of randomness, meaninglessness and evolving standards of Darwinian evolution as the basis of all American laws. The entire progressive movement, beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, was predicated on Darwinism, humanism and relativism. In a famous 1886 essay, Nietzsche proclaimed, “God is dead”; the progressive revolution presided over God’s funeral … or so they thought. A hundred years later, in 1990, Judge Richard A. Posner affirmed his relativism and atheism, triumphantly characterizing Justice Holmes as “the American Nietzsche.”

Nevertheless, I like to remember the words of MLK who said, “Truth crushed to the earth will rise again.” The MLK memorial, whose Chinese artist, Lei Yixin, paradoxically created a Mao-like statute of Dr. King that is stern, flat, rigid and derivative of socialist realism, will be formally dedicated at the Mall in Washington, D.C., in September or October.

MLK’s words will live on for the ages and give me comfort that Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as all of the legislation of Congress, academic disciplines and atheistic, relativistic philosophies based upon evolution, including the legal philosophy of Justice O.W. Holmes, will one day be exposed as one of the biggest frauds in the history of humanity.

Pick any grand liberal, humanist, progressive or socialist policy over the past 100 years – Theodore Roosevelt’s “Square Deal,” Woodrow Wilson’s “Statolatry” (state worship), FDR “New Deal” policies of the 1930s and ’40s, Truman’s “Fair Deal,” LBJ’s “Great Society of the 1960s or President Obama’s neo-socialist, Keynesian policies of today; despite all of them being disastrous and ruining the lives of tens of millions of American citizens, they completely enshrine Holmes’ Darwinian thinking, his evolutionary jurisprudence and his virulently irrational, anti-Christian bias on society, culture and law.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is a former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He is an instructor at Spring Arbor University, the American College of Education, and the National Paralegal College. Washington is a co-host on “Joshua’s Trial, a radio show of Christian conservative thought. He is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and has written extensively on constitutional law, history, politics, philosophy, critical race theory and other subjects. His latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust” (2008) and law review article, “Natural Law Considerations of Juvenile Law” (2010). Visit his website, Ellis Washington Report.

 

WesternFront America

Justice Souter actually provided a primer on how not to be a judge. He made up a Constitution that never was to justify a kind of judicial power that was never intended.

~ McGinnis & Rappaport, “Souter’s Bad Constitutional History”

Recently retired Justice David Souter delivered the commencement address at Harvard where several statements were direct attacks against the originalist understanding of the Constitution as held by Justices Thomas and Scalia, calling originalism a “simplistic” model of giving the Constitution a “fair reading.”

Law professors John McGinnis and Michael Rappaport in a Wall Street Journal article offer the reader a brilliant retort to Justice Souter’s liberal “living Constitution” jurisprudence, wherein the judge makes up the Constitution as he goes along based on his own personal policy preferences instead of relying on the plain meaning of the document, which is the original intent of the framers.

McGinnis and Rappaport wrote:

One of Justice Souter’s two primary examples of the need for justices to avoid simplistic judging (i.e., originalism) is Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 case barring public-school segregation. A central premise of Justice Souter’s praise of Brown is that it was dictated not by the Constitution’s original meaning but by new social realities.

Indeed, but what were these “new social realities” invented by Brown v. Board of Education? One was based on a doll study conducted by Howard psychology professors Dr. Kenneth Clark and Dr. Mamie Phipps Clark, where children were asked which of the various colored dolls were their favorite. Because the majority of black children tested chose white dolls, NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall (and future justice of the Supreme Court) was able to use this research to convince the Supreme Court that their findings revealed that racial discrimination was so endemic in society as to be psychologically damaging to the educational development of black children.

While psychological speculations may impress most liberal activist judges, a Natural Law–original intent reading of the Constitution demonstrates to me that America didn’t really need the Supreme Court decision of Brown v. Board of Education. Why? If Congress had simply followed the original intent of the framers, which was based on Natural Law and expanded Thomas Jefferson’s admonition in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” then Brown wouldn’t have been necessary. Such a singular statement of equality for all should have been enacted into constitutional law via the Reconstruction-era amendments, or by the Supreme Court resurrecting this Natural Law precept as a fundamental principle of federalism.

In my law-review article “Brown v. Board of Education: Right Result, Wrong Reasoning,” I outlined what Brown should have said based on the arguments the abolitionist used to combat slavery 100 years earlier:

Until the early 20th century, the Supreme Court followed societal presumptions [based] on an integration of legality and morality. These presumptions were both impliedly and overtly expressed in many of the Supreme Court opinions dealing with issues of morality, religion and the elements of a civilized society. Since its earliest decisions, the Supreme Court had formulated its ideas on morality, liberty, justice and equality. The Court affirmed the dignity of all God’s creation; that all people had certain, basic natural rights that were guaranteed to them by their very humanity – an inalienable or natural right that transcends the mere laws of man. In the context of Brown, these inalienable rights should extend to black people. …

“In the 19th century, Supreme Court decisions quoted philosophers at greater length than more contemporary opinions, but virtually all references were to Montesquieu, whose L’Esprit des Loix (“The Spirit of Laws”) was repeatedly cited for propositions of limited government, balance of powers and the need for virtuous citizens. … The Court’s reference to such thinkers seems natural and appropriate, especially because many references were to the principles of separation of powers and the institutional limits of the Court.” The Court thought that the abolitionist’s reasoning about black people being equal to white people on natural law, moral, religious or humanitarian grounds to be, at best, provincial and unsophisticated; at worst, fanatical, medieval and hyper-religious.

(Column continues below)

The increasing arrogance and fascist tendencies of liberalism amaze me. What gives Justice Souter and his other liberal activist colleagues like Ginsburg, Stevens, Sotomayor, Breyer and even Kennedy the right to place their own personal policy preferences (Positive Law) above the original intent of the constitutional framers (Natural Law)? If anyone is being “simplistic” here, it is these socialist judges who follow unconstitutional traditions derived from the substantive due-process jurisprudence beginning with Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), a false doctrine the Court first created out of whole cloth to justify a “natural right” to slavery and de jure discrimination under Plessy v. Ferguson (1898).

Should the Constitution be determined by liberal jurists like Justice David Souter, a man who after 19 years on the high court did irreparable harm to the Constitution and had not one memorable utterance or judicial principle, or should the Constitution be determined by the constitutional framers, men who put their lives on the line to found this republic: Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and Hamilton? Here, Justice Souter’s “current social realities” must never trump the Constitution’s original meaning.

Had Natural Law jurisprudence governed, would Brown v. Board of Education have been necessary? McGinnis and Rappaport don’t answer that question directly but write: “While we believe that an originalist reading of the Constitution also supports Brown, the salient point here is that Brown would not have had such central importance had the Reconstruction-era [13th, 14th and 15th] amendments been enforced according to their original meaning.”

Just as the legions of liberal and Marxist professors currently occupying Harvard are intellectual squatters of the original house of Harvard founded in 1636 by ultraconservative Christian Puritans, likewise Justice Souter’s 19-year tenure will be viewed by honest legal historians as that of a judicial simpleton and an unremarkable squatter in the august halls of the Supreme Court.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He hosts a radio program Thursdays at 11 a.m. Eastern on 1620 AM in Atlanta. It can be heard online at the Radio Sandy Springs website. His weekly podcasts are available Mondays at The Conservative Beacon. Washington is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

 

WesternFront America

I just read  Can Kagan Be Trusted to Defend the Constitution? in which   Ross Kaminsky  assembles the critical pieces of the nominee’s attitude toward the First Amendment’s free speech clause. I want you to follow that link to Human Events.

Kaminsky points out how Kagan’s arguments in important cases before  the  Supreme Court indicate an unacceptable lack of respect for the right of free expression.  Crucial quotes from a paper she wrote amplify that concern. I am glad that Kaminsky posted a link to the paper, because I clicked it and saw its title. “Private Speech, Public Purpose: The Role of Governmental Motive in First Amendment Doctrine”  Since when do the ends justify the means?   This quote was found on page 55 of the paper.

The realm of public expression may have too much of some kinds of speech, too little of others; some speakers may drown out or dominate their opposite numbers. Self-conscious redistribution of expressive opportunities seems the most direct way of correcting these defects and achieving the appropriate range and balance of viewpoint.

President Obama spoke to the graduates  at Hampton University, giving us some clues.

And meanwhile, you’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank that high on the truth meter.  And with iPods and iPads; and Xboxes and PlayStations — none of which I know how to work — (laughter) — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.  So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it’s putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy.

Perhaps outlining some crucial points will make things clear for you.

• bombards us
  • all kinds of content
• exposes us
  • all kinds of arguments
    • don’t always rank that high on the truth meter
• information becomes a distraction
• putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy

That is dictator speak for “I need  new laws to squelch my critics who are hampering my efforts to enslave you and cement my party in power.”  What is the relevance to Kagan’s screed?  Another outline is in order.

• too much of some kinds of speech
• drown out or dominate
• redistribution of expressive opportunities
  • correcting these defects
    • appropriate
    • • viewpoint.
      • • range
        • balance

What do they have in common?  Arrogance!!  That single characteristic sticks out like a sore thumb.  We are bombarded with all kinds of arguments, which may be untrue, and become a distraction, putting pressure on our democracy.  There  is too much of some speech, drowning out and dominating others. The remedy is redistribution of expressive opportunities assuring appropriate range and balance of viewpoint.

The President and his latest nominee to the Supreme Court are two  nuts in a Socialist shell who seek legislation to  criminalize criticism of their policies.  That is exactly what the First Amendment is intended to prevent.

Those two nuts are not alone in that Socialist shell, they share it with Mark Lloyd,  Obama’s appointee to the FCC.  Three years ago, he co-authored
“The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio“.  That screed asserts that there is too much Conservative speech on talk radio and suggests public policy changes to reduce Conservative speech, supplanting it with Socialist speech.

We are facing authoritarian demagogues who seek to overthrow our representative republic, replacing it with an autocracy.  First, they must silence the guard dogs.

There are not enough  Republicans in the Senate to block this nomination.  Worse yet, they lack the resolve required, they are caving in.  We have no recourse except to rise up and raise Hell.  We must send a clear message to our Senators: Kagan is not fit to sit on the court: your vote for this nomination guarantees my vote against you in the next election cycle.  Reverence for the rights enshrined in the Constitution is the most important qualification for a Supreme Court Justice; Kagan lacks it.

http://www.congress.org/ has a form you can use to send an email to your Senators. It is free and easy. I urge you to use it immediately.

Originally posted at Ben’s Blog © Dajjal

 

WesternFront America

Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

~ Thomas Jefferson

John Paul Stevens, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for 35 years, announced his retirement earlier this week. Court watchers, political prognosticators and media mavens are speculating about whom President Obama will appoint to this godlike position.

Below are Obama’s nine probable nominees to the Supreme Court:

• Hillary Clinton (secretary of state; Obama would love to put Hillary on ice at SCOTUS to block her from running against him in 2012 and against Michelle Obama in 2016)
• Merrick Garland (on the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, a doctrinaire liberal who believes in social justice [Marxism] and liberal activism)
• Elena Kagan (former dean of Harvard Law School; Obama burnished her resume by appointing her solicitor general in 2009)
• Janet Napolitano (former governor of Arizona who twice vetoed a state ban on partial-birth abortion; as secretary of DHS Napolitano has proven to be an intellectual midget with fascist tendencies who is philosophically most like Obama)
• Deval Patrick (an unremarkable black socialist governor of [Tax]achusetts)
• Kathleen Sullivan (protégé of Harvard “living and evolving Constitution” professor Laurence Tribe; a Marxist activist jurist to the core)
• Leah Ward Sears (former chief justice of Georgia Supreme Court and a friend of Justice Clarence Thomas; a liberal jurist whose has written nothing memorable)
• Jennifer Granholm (Harvard Law grad; most incompetent governor in Michigan history)
• Cass Sunstein (regulatory czar, prolific author whose oeuvre makes him a second-rate Leon Trotsky [Permanent Revolution] and a third-rate Josef Goebbels [Big Lie propagandist])
• Diane Wood (a radical left judicial activist on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals).

President Obama, who fashions himself as a constitutional law scholar, should only consider this singular qualification to the Supreme Court: Does the jurist have a self-evident belief and demonstrable record in constitutionalism, Natural Law and the original intent the framers?

When reviewing the body of work of each candidate, if it can be clearly and unmistakably ascertained that the answer to this question is no, then under our Constitution that person is unfit to serve on our nation’s highest court. Period!

Americas’ paradox is this: Seventeen months ago, America suffered a de facto revolution by electing this regime without adequate vetting. Obama has repeatedly shown his utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution, preferring activist judges who legislate from the bench and his bizarre belief that the Warren Court (1953-69) didn’t go far enough in enshrining “redistributive change” (i.e., integrating Marxist socialist ideas into the rule of law and into every sector of society, thus making the Constitution a dead letter).

In a 2001 radio interview, Obama gave America a glimpse into the perverse mind of The Regime and what type of characteristics he considers in an ideal judge:

… The Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution, at least as it’s been interpreted, and the Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the federal government or state government must do on your behalf.

And that hasn’t shifted, and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, because the civil rights movement became so court focused, I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.

I’m not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts. You know, the institution just isn’t structured that way.

Has the man never heard of the separation-of-powers doctrine and judicial restraint? President Obama believes that a judge must be an agent for social change, a super-legislator, an unelected dictator. That’s diametrical to what the framers believed. Jefferson said, “To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.” Remember that Lady Justice is blind because judges are not to consider rich or poor, black or white, Jew or gentile, but to interpret the law according to the Constitution. Period!

I believe Obama’s actual nominee will be either Diane Wood or Elena Kagan; however, Napolitano would be Obama’s dream pick because perhaps no other person in his administration is so utterly aligned philosophically with his radical, fascist, anti-American views than she. Remember that it was Napolitano who in December 2009, the day after the Christmas Day bomber failed to set off his bomb in an airplane over Detroit, proudly said, “The system worked.”

In an April 2009 classified memo, Secretary Napolitano focused on labeling political opponents of the president, including ex-military, as terrorists and “right-wing extremists” while downplaying Islamic fascism against the United States by calling them “man-caused disasters,” even purging phrases likes “Islamic fascist” and “Muslim terrorist” from all official policy documents.

This treason is epidemic in Washington, D.C., for there is not one Democrat in Congress that really believes in Natural Law, original intent, originalism or constitutionalism according to the transcendent ideas the framers of the Constitution held sacred – liberty, freedom, morality, market capitalism, Veritas (truth).

What is the singular Supreme Court qualification President Obama should rely upon? Hearken to the words of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson who prophesied hundreds of years ago: Let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him [President Obama] down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington is former editor of the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute. He hosts a radio program Thursdays at 11 a.m. Eastern on 1620 AM in Atlanta. It can be heard online at the Radio Sandy Springs website. His weekly podcasts are available Mondays at The Conservative Beacon. Washington is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

 

WesternFront America

[T]he words of the [Eighth] Amendment are not precise, and … their scope is not static. The Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.

~ Trop v. Dulles (1958)

One of the holiest scriptures of the totalitarian religion of liberalism is the legal aphorism, “evolving standards of decency.” For decades progressives, Democrat legislators, activist judges and humanist law academics have proclaimed their spiritual devotion to this sacred verse of the so-called “Living Constitution” doctrine. That ubiquitous phrase sounds so clinical, so egalitarian, so nice and caring, which belies its surreptitious meaning and evil intent in American law over the past 100 years.

This brings me to the corollary of that phrase, which ironically defines its real meaning – not evolving standards of decency, but devolving standards of indecency.

Living Constitutionalism is based on the idea that society changes, evolves and requires that constitutional controversies comply with evolving societal changes. An early exponent of the Living Constitution jurisprudence was Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who as early as 1914 wrote, “The provisions of the Constitution are not mathematical formulas. … They are organic, living institutions.” In a 1987 speech, Justice Thurgood Marshall likewise evoked the Living Constitution doctrine when he said that the law “must be considered in the light of our whole experience and not merely in that of what was said a hundred years ago.”

One of the most popular applications of Living Constitution jurisprudence was the Supreme Court’s reference to “evolving standards of decency” in the 1958 case Trop v. Dulles, a 5-4 decision that held it was unconstitutional for the federal government to cancel the citizenship of a U.S. citizen as a punishment. The ruling’s reference to “evolving standards of decency” is frequently cited precedent in the court’s interpretation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishment.” The Court wrote:

[T]he words of the [Eighth] Amendment are not precise, and … their scope is not static. The Amendment must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.

Since the Trop case, liberal activist judges have used the phrase “evolving standards of decency” repeatedly to either rewrite, pervert or marginalize the Constitution, rendering this sacred document into a meaningless litany of words.

Judge Robert Bork made a compelling critique against Laurence Tribe, a leading exponent of Living Constitution jurisprudence and professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard, when Bork rightly deduced that the Living Constitution doctrine has a protean meaning. Protean denotes that the Constitution can become whatever the person (e.g., legislator, bureaucrat, academic, lawyer or judge) wills it to be in order to reach a desired policy outcome. America, that’s treason!

I am persuaded that the Living Constitution doctrine is a Machiavellian Trojan horse utilized by Democrat lawmakers and liberal activist judges from its creation in the early 1900s through the protean “incorporation doctrine.” In the 1940s this treasonous incorporation doctrine greatly expanded with broad interpretations of the equal protection and due process clauses of the Fifth and 14th Amendments, which expanded these amendments’ application beyond their original intent of checking and balancing Congress, to almost exclusively be applied to the states. Radical federalism now trumps states’ rights.

Here is where the devil is indeed in the details. Liberals love to feign themselves as champions of the poor, women, minorities and the “disenfranchised.” Those who disagree with them are castigated by the government-controlled media as idiots, haters and racists. Public Enemy No. 1 to liberals are America’s Founding Fathers whom they consider the lowest hypocrites for having slaves and demeaning women while placing themselves in the most favored positions in society.

According to the liberal revisionist view of history, racial minorities and women were not entitled to liberty or equal protection at the time of the Constitution’s ratification in 1791, therefore originalism or original intent is an inadequate remedy for these and associated desperate groups to achieve justice. Progressives and liberal Democrats believe that the Constitution therefore must be more proactive to address existential societal needs and that judges are at the vanguard to address these societal concerns and to dispense justice, opportunities and reparations equitably to all citizens.

On the other hand, economist Thomas Sowell, in his 1996 book, “Knowledge and Decisions,” contends that since the original makers of the Constitution allowed for the process of changing it, they never intended for their original words to change meaning. Sowell also uses original sources to contradict the conventional thinking of today that propose there were cases where arguments were never considered from the Constitution’s framers, when the historical record would prove otherwise. In other words, there is nothing new under the sun.

Justice Antonin Scalia is perhaps one of the most well-known and vociferous foes of judicial activism, whereby the judge sitting in the legislator’s chair substitutes his own personal policy views in place of the rule of law. This perverts the entire separation of powers structure of the Constitution and replaces it with an individual’s ability to influence his government, thus transferring that decision-making power from “We the People” to an oligarchy of unelected and unaccountable judges.

Devolving standards of indecency is perverting the moral rectitude of the rule of law for lawlessness and immorality. Fascists like Obama don’t have time to rely on antiquated notions of Congress passing laws under a representative democracy, so he dons his Mussolini hat and becomes the CEO of GM by executive fiat and champions the totalitarian desires of Marxists like Chavez of Venezuela and Zelaya of Honduras, while turning a blind eye to pseudo-democratic nations like China, Russia, North Korea, Sudan, Gaza and Iran.

Devolving standards of indecency presently has Chairman Obama’s eyes set on taking over the U.S. banking system, Wall Street, the home mortgage industry, health care and beyond. To give his fascist decrees the color of law, activist judges like Sonia Sotomayor will be there with the rubberstamp of approval.

Evolving standards of decency in constitutional law always produces devolving standards of indecency in the Supreme Court, in Congress, in culture and society, unless We the People return to the black-letter text of the U.S. Constitution and throw all of the poverty pimps, political hacks and liberal activist judges out of office.

© Ellis Washington

Ellis Washington, currently a professor of law and political science at Savannah State University, former editor at the Michigan Law Review and law clerk at The Rutherford Institute, is a graduate of John Marshall Law School and a lecturer and freelance writer on constitutional law, legal history, political philosophy and critical race theory. He has written over a dozen law review articles and several books, including “The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law and the Rule of Law” (2002). See his law review article “Reply to Judge Richard Posner.” Washington’s latest book is “The Nuremberg Trials: Last Tragedy of the Holocaust.”

 

WesternFront America

Sit on the Supreme Court? Heck, Sonia Sotomayor isn’t fit to sit on a jury! Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s Senate confirmation hearings today enter their fifth day. On Day One, Sen. Lindsey Graham (Vichy-SC) stated to her, on the record, “Unless you have a complete meltdown you’re going to get confirmed.”

Sotomayor was a longtime board member of the racist, irredentist, Hispanic supremacist group, La Raza (The Race), which is the equivalent of a white being a Grand Kleagle of the KKK. She has a history of bullying lawyers. She has publicly made in-your-face racist and sexist statements about her approach to deciding the law, and publicly bragged, in violation of the constitutional separation of powers, of legislating from the bench.

Not only did Sotomayor ignore the cast-iron cinch of an argument for the white firemen plaintiffs in Ricci v. DeStefano that came before her three-judge appeals panel, but with her two colleagues engaged in unethical deception, in seeking to “bury” the case with “a one-paragraph, unpublished, summary order with no mention of … the ‘questions of exceptional importance’ raised in the appeal,” in an attempt to hide this fundamental constitutional case from the Supreme Court. And they would have succeeded, had Judge Jose A. Cabranes, a colleague from the full Second Circuit, not publicly dissented.

The poorly reasoned decisions of this “quota queen” have been reversed by the Supreme Court at an extraordinary, 66.7 percent rate, including Ricci.

Sotomayor has repeatedly lied, in insisting that it has been “proven” that all mental and professional tests—on which she admittedly performed mediocrely—are “culturally biased.” “… my test scores were not comparable to that of my classmates. And that’s been shown by statistics, there are reasons for that. There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action to try to balance out those effects.”

That would be an Asian cultural bias.

As Larry Auster and others have pointed out (from here to here), Sotomayor has also repeatedly engaged in deception during her sworn testimony before the Senate this week, in misrepresenting her repeated racist (“wise Latina woman”) and unethical statements (about making policy from the bench). All the training in the world from David Axelrod, et al., couldn’t help her there. What has saved her, however, has been the cowardice of the Living Dead Party. If there were any men left in the Senate, they would have announced that Sotomayor’s racism disqualified her from the bench.

Any judge worth his salt would be ashamed to use his ethnicity as a “qualification” for the bench, because it would be a confession that he was an unqualified, incompetent interpreter of the law. Yet Sotomayor revels in her ethnicity.

At every step of the way, Sotomayor has benefited not from her ability, but from affirmative action, in other words, from racism. Indeed, she has bragged, “I am a product of affirmative action. I am the perfect affirmative action baby.”

She has agitated for Hispanics’ “right” to be admitted to “highly selective” universities, despite demonstrably inferior test scores, and to be hired as professors despite a lack of scholarship, based on nothing more than their ethnicity, and for “Hispanic” litigants’ (who, since she assumes they do not know English, sounds like a euphemism for illegal aliens) “right” to have Hispanic judges preside over their court cases, i.e., take their side against non-Hispanics and American institutions. Thus would Sotomayor reduce all public life to a rigged ethnic spoils system, thereby throwing generations of valid mental and professional testing and scholarship, the merit principle, 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and 1964 Civil Rights Act out the window.

Sotomayor isn’t a jurist at all; this self-styled “wise Latina woman” is an ethnocentric, separatist advocate who, consistent with her racism and sexism, hates the rule of law, fairness, science and meritocracy.

Is there a single positive reason why this woman should be sitting on the bench in traffic court? To ask the question is to answer it.

But Sotomayor is not only unqualified to serve as a traffic court judge. As former U.S. attorney—but please don’t hold it against him—Andrew McCarthy has pointed out, Sotomayor is unqualified even to serve as a juror in the lowest level court. McCarthy quotes the standard instruction that every judge must read to the jury:

You have two duties as a jury. Your first duty is to decide the facts from the evidence in the case. This is your job, and yours alone. Your second duty is to apply the law that I give you to the facts. You must follow these instructions, even if you disagree with them…. Perform these duties fairly and impartially. Do not allow sympathy, prejudice, fear, or public opinion to influence you. You should not be influenced by any person’s race, color, religion, national ancestry, or sex.

McCarthy then asks,

Would Judge Sotomayor be qualified to serve as a juror? Let’s say she forthrightly explained to the court during the voir dire (the jury-selection phase of a case) that she believed a wise Latina makes better judgments than a white male; that she doubts it is actually possible to “transcend [one's] personal sympathies and prejudices and aspire to achieve a greater degree of fairness and integrity based on the reason of law”; and that there are “basic differences” in the way people “of color” exercise “logic and reasoning.” If, upon hearing that, would it not be reasonable for a lawyer for one (or both) of the parties to ask the court to excuse her for cause? Would it not be incumbent on the court to grant that request? Should we have on the Supreme Court, where jury verdicts are reviewed, a justice who would have difficulty qualifying for jury service?

For what job, then, is this self-proclaimed “wise Latina woman” qualified? If she were a man with a strong back, I’d say digging ditches. But that’s not an option, though it would be fit punishment. What do we do with racist, treasonous, incompetent “persons of color” who are good for nothing? Why, we make them President!

© Nicholas Stix

 

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Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise

thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech …

~ Bill of Rights, First Amendment (1789)

The Christian has no rights that liberals and Democrats are bound to respect.

~ Ellis Washington, a paraphrase of Justice Taney’s Dred Scott opinion.

If it has been 61 years, it has been a day – 61 years since the Supreme Court of the United States enshrined into constitutional law and into society the judge-created doctrine “separation of church and state” in the landmark case McCollum v. Board of Education (1948). American law, politics, culture and society haven’t been the same since.

In my humble opinion, the McCollum case is so diabolical and so sophistic an opinion that it rivals the notorious Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) decision, which upheld the continued slavery of my people. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney infamously held in that case: The Negro has no rights that the white man is bound to respect.

For the six decades since the McCollum decision, the wickedness and arrogance of the Dred Scott opinion has been exemplified in the continued legacy of Supreme Court cases that hate, not black people in these cases but America’s rich Judeo-Christian traditions of intellectual thought:

• Everson v. Board of Education, 330 U.S. 1 (1947) was the leading Supreme Court case in the United States in regards to Establishment Clause law. Furthermore this case was one of the earliest examples of the judge-created incorporation doctrine (applying it to the States through the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment).
• Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v. Grumet (1994), the majority of the court joined Justice David Souter’s opinion, which stated that “government should not prefer one religion to another, or religion to irreligion.”
• In 2001, Roy Moore, formerly the chief justice of Alabama, installed a monument of the Ten Commandments in the state judicial building. In 2003, in the case of Glassroth v. Moore he was ordered by a federal judge to remove the monument, but he refused to comply, ultimately leading to his removal from office. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case, allowing the lower court’s decision to stand.

Humanists, atheists, socialists and liberals’ war against America’s Judeo-Christian traditions began in earnest in the late 1940s and can be summarized with a paraphrase of Justice Taney’s sentiments against black Americans and slaves – The Christian has no rights that liberals and Democrats are bound to respect … until today.

Just when I thought that the Supreme Court was irredeemably broken, we have come full circle from the anti-Christian cases, Everson and McCollum in the 1940s. As a matter of fact, SCOTUS on Wednesday handed down a rare unanimous 9-0 decision in favor of Christian organizations having the First Amendment freedom of speech right to place a religious monument like the Ten Commandments on public or private property.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the Court in Pleasant Grove City v. Summum, saying that such a monument, whether government-financed or privately donated, must be considered “government speech,” conveying a message that it wishes to get out about “esthetics, history and local culture.” (Note that this case was not decided on freedom of religion grounds.)

On the Court’s blog, www.scotusblog.com, a summary of the case reads as follows:

The ruling turned solely on the Constitution’s Free Speech Clause. A religious sect, the Summum, contended that its free speech rights were violated when the city of Pleasant Grove City, Utah, accepted a Ten Commandments monument in its public park but refused to accept a monument displaying tenets of the Summum faith. The “Seven Aphorisms” of that faith represent what believers view as the contents of the original tablets handed down by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.Justice Alito’s opinion noted that, when acceptance of a Ten Commandments or other religious monument is treated as conveying the message of the government, the free speech clause does not apply, since that clause only restricts government regulation of private speech. Even if the government speaks through a display provided by some private person or group, the opinion added, that does not take away from its character as government speech.

Alito added that the government, however, is not free to utter a message that violates the Constitution’s ban on official “establishment” of religion. That, however, was not at issue in the Summum case at this point.

Despite the 9-0 ruling, it should be noted that “four justices filed concurring opinions, representing the views of six justices, thus requiring their views to be taken into account in determining just when governments may put up such monuments on public property.” Despite the Court’s disunity, nevertheless, I am elated that after 61 years, multiple social movements and moral revolutions later, the Court got a case right protecting free speech.

Yet, rather than a unified judicial theory of freedom of speech, the Court had to have five different opinions out of nine justices regarding one “unanimous” opinion. Yes, on one level I believe that the Court got one right by allowing a Ten Commandments monument erected on state property without a blasphemous anti-Ten Commandments monument from some cult next to it. Yet, on another level, if “We the People” are the creators of the state, the courts, the government, the republic, the Constitution, then why should we have to beg the Court to defend freedom of religion allegedly protected by the Bill of Rights? Ipso facto – the thing speaks for itself!

In conclusion, if a Christian who was a sitting chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court like Roy Moore, a man of impeccable character, can be impeached for placing a Christian monument on state property, now that SCOTUS has called this act constitutional, can Judge Moore be reinstated on the bench? On second thought, perhaps our freedoms are not that free after all.

 

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