June 13, 2008

Is it Time to March on the Supreme Court of California and on the Supreme Court of the U.S.?

This democracy cannot survive if our supreme court justices arrogate to themselves the right to dictate to the people - to be, in the words of Mark Steyn, our "monarchs".

Just last month, the Supreme Court of California, seeking to make law from the bench, rather than to do its rightful job of merely interpreting the State Constitution, sought to overturn the expressed will of the people and force gay marriage on the people of California. Per Mark Steyn:

...what happened here was not just a sly judicial coup, but an explicit one in the wake of the expressed will of the California electorate, and their elected representatives. And what's interesting to me about this general business of judicial activism, in a period when most sort of sources of authority in society, whether you're talking about politicians or the Church, or I suppose the media, if you mean fellows like Walter Cronkite, when most of those sources have diminished in authority, we have kind of compensated by over-venerating a handful of guys in black robes, just because they happen to be called judges, and sit on a fancy court. And there's no reason for this. It's entirely at odds with the founders' conception of a functioning republic, that in effect, you should turn a handful of judges into super monarchs who can overrule.

This week the Supreme Court of our nation, by a 5-4 vote, declared that enemy soldiers who are trying to kill us have protections under our laws that, in the dissenting opinion of Justice Scalia, "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." Scalia's dissent states:

Today the Court warps our Constitution in a way that goes beyond the narrow issue of the reach of the Suspension Clause, invoking judicially brainstormed separation-of-powers principles to establish a manipulable “functional” test for the extraterritorial reach of habeas corpus (and, no doubt, for the extraterritorial reach of other constitutional protections as well). It blatantly misdescribes important precedents, most conspicuously Justice Jackson’s opinion for the Court in Johnson v. Eisentrager. It breaks a chain of precedent as old as the common law that prohibits judicial inquiry into detentions of aliens abroad absent statutory authorization. And, most tragically, it sets our military commanders the impossible task of proving to a civilian court, under whatever standards this Court devises in the future, that evidence supports the confinement of each and every enemy prisoner.

The Nation will live to regret what the Court has done today.

The Supreme Court of the nation has made a ruling that, in the words of dissenting Justice Scalia, "will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." 

There's one thing the 5 Supreme Court justices who seek to be our super-monarchs have overlooked.

We, the American people, do not like things that put our countrymen in danger of being killed. We, the American people, do not like our officials arrogating to themselves powers that were not intended by the Constitution, and making decisions which put our lives in danger.

There is one power in this country that is greater than the Supreme Court. That is we, the people. If the Supreme Court of California and the Supreme Court of the U.S. are to try to become our monarchs, it may be time for a popular march on both courts, in the tradition of American's great historic marches.