Posted on 09/29/2003 10:33:25 AM PDT by Vindiciae Contra TyrannoSCOTUS
Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., introduces Safeguarding Our Religious Liberties Act to restrict federal courts from ruling on Commandments, Pledge and national motto.
The fight against judicial tyranny picked up steam Thursday when a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives to prohibit federal courts from ruling on constitutional challenges to the display of the Ten Commandments, recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance and the mere existence of the national motto.
U.S. Rep. Chip Pickering, R-Miss., is the chief sponsor of the Safeguarding Our Religious Liberties Act, the mirror image of a Senate bill introduced this summer by Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo. Both bills point to Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution as the authority for taking certain matters out of the hands of federal courts (at least those below the Supreme Court) and reserving them as matters for individual states to decide.
Pickering's bill, H.R. 3190, is the fifth piece of legislation to seek, in some fashion, to limit the power of the judiciary to have the final say on certain issues of religious liberty. Amanda Izsak, federal issues analyst at Focus on the Family, said Pickering's bill and Allard's — S. 1558, the Religious Liberty Restoration Act — are the best of the bunch.
"They are the strongest and most comprehensive, stripping federal courts from the Pledge, 'In God We Trust' and the Ten Commandments," Izsak said. "No other bill addresses all three of these important religious-liberty issues."
The fact that a form of the legislation has now been introduced into each chamber of Congress, she added, "demonstrates real commitment from legislators and gives the legislation a great chance of success."
"This is wonderful news for the millions of Americans who want their religious liberties protected. This bill will halt our runaway judiciary and place fair limits on the breadth of their power."
In asking Congress to apply Article III, Section 2, the bills seek nothing that the House and Senate haven't done routinely throughout history — and more than a dozen times during the 107th Congress.
In the 2002 Senate appropriations bill for funds to fight the war on terror, for instance, language protecting the Black Hills National Forest in South Dakota from certain environmental restrictions included this note: "Any actions authorized by this section shall not be subject to judicial review by any court of the United States." The author of that language? None other than famously liberal South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle.
Among the other laws passed that invoked Article III, Section 2 powers were the Small Business Liability Relief and Brownfields Revitalization Act, the American Servicemembers Protection Act of 2002, the Aviation Security Act and even a law to expedite construction of a World War II memorial in Washington, D.C.
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To learn more about the Safeguarding Our Religious Liberties Act and other bills to rein in the federal judiciary, visit Focus on the Family's "Stop Judicial Tyranny" Web site.
It is not reasoned judgment that supports the Court's decision; only personal predilection. Justice Curtis's warning is as timely today as it was 135 years ago:
"[W]hen a strict interpretation of the Constitution, according to the fixed rules which govern the interpretation of laws, is abandoned, and the theoretical opinions of individuals are allowed to control its meaning, we have no longer a Constitution; we are under the government of individual men, who for the time being have power to declare what the Constitution is, according to their own views of what it ought tomean." Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393, 621 (1857) (Curtis, J., dissenting).
" Liberty finds no refuge in a jurisprudence of doubt. "
[...]
The Imperial Judiciary lives. It is instructive to compare this Nietzschean vision of us unelected, life tenured judges--leading a Volk who will be "tested by following," and whose very "belief in themselves" is mystically bound up in their "understanding" of a Court that "speak[s] before all others for their constitutional ideals"--with the somewhat more modest role envisioned for these lawyers by the Founders.
"The judiciary . . . has . . . no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither Force nor Will but merely judgment . . . ." The Federalist No. 78, pp. 393-394 (G. Wills ed. 1982).
Or, again, to compare this ecstasy of a Supreme Court in which there is, especially on controversial matters, no shadow of change or hint of alteration ("There is a limit to the amount of error that can plausibly be imputed to prior courts," ante, at 24), with the more democratic views of a more humble man:
"[T]he candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal." A. Lincoln, First Inaugural Address (Mar. 4, 1861), reprinted in Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States, S. Doc. No. 101-10, p. 139 (1989). Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pa. v. Casey, 505 US 833 ( ... Justice Scalia, with whom the Chief Justice, Justice White, and Justice Thomas join, concurring in the judgment in part and dissenting in part.
Judge Robert Bork's new book examines how judicial tyranny came to be such a threat not only to the American way of life -- but to all of Western civilization.
There is more to judicial tyranny than a federal judge ordering a Ten Commandments monument out of the rotunda of the Alabama courts building. There is a worldwide systematic power-grab going on — and you probably aren't even aware of it.
Liberals, who are unable to win a vast worldwide culture war in a democratic form, are increasingly turning to the courts to wage their battle. Unfortunately, judges steeped in a liberal ideology and heady with power they have arrogated to themselves are responding — with decisions bordering on judicial tyranny. The 'Cult of the Judge' (Judge Robert Bork's new book)
The Inseparability of Law and Morality: The Constitution, Natural Law, and the Rule of Law is an opus based entirely on Natural law- the original philosophy of the Constitutional Framers. Ellis Washington shows how and where America went wrong in separating law from morals, by applying Natural law precepts to a wide variety of contemporary, legal, moral, political, social and philosophical problems. Washington exposes the sophistry of former and current legal and philosophical approaches to the law like: democracy, positive law, utilitarianism, relativism, egalitarianism, secularism, liberalism, feminism, progressivism, pragmatism, materialism; ideas, which have in modern times, proven themselves to be wholly untenable, dangerous and inevitably lead to a corruption of societal morality. He concludes that the only solution to regain public civility and respect for the rule of law is for America to return to the ancient notions of Natural law and the original intent of the Constitutional Framers.
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