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Interposition
Since Jul 3, 2008
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There you have it — the ultimate act of interposition. Not a rebellion by a disorderly mob, not a coup by a band of unelected thugs like the leaders of the French Revolution who represented nobody but themselves, but an act of interposition by the legitimate, duly-elected representatives of the people — the lesser magistrates protecting the people who have entrusted them with authority, against the higher magistrates who have become tyrants.[2]
That example may be easier to understand than the definition for interposition given by the Fourth Edition of Black’s Law Dictionary:[3]
The doctrine that a state, in the exercise of its sovereignty, may reject a mandate of the federal government deemed to be unconstitutional or to exceed the powers delegated to the federal government.That doctrine has been called The Doctrine of ‘98[4].Is it a false doctrine? According to the United States Constitution, it is sound doctrine: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.”[5]
The greatest heresy is the doctrine of incorporation[6] mysteriously derived from the obsolete[7] Fourteenth Amendment.[8] This false doctrine[9] allows federal courts to apply the Bill Of Rights against the States.[10] It is diametrically opposite the purpose of the Bill Of Rights expressed in the Preamble of the first Ten Amendments:[11]
THE Conventions of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added: And as extending the ground of public confidence in the Government, will best insure the beneficent ends of its institutionFalse doctrine established majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court as the de facto oligarchy, or tyrant of America.[12] But federal courts do not make law.[13] Their decisions are only evidence of law binding only the parties of the case.[14] And the executive is not legally or morally bound to enforce any decision contrary to his understanding of the Constitution.[15] Everyone howls about judicial review; but you seldom hear anything of executive review. Congress has the power to review the other federal departments via the Impeachment Clauses.[16] It has plenary power[17] under Article III to abolish all lower federal courts[18] and confine the U.S. Supreme Court to one judge presiding over original jurisdiction cases only.[19]
You can not blame the courts for transformation of this Republic[20] into Leviathan. Executive review[21] of federal court majority opinions and Article III[22] are Constitutional powers that are refused.
Who is to blame? Who elects your representatives? The mass media doesn’t. The schools don’t. The ACLU lacks sufficient membership to elect anyone. Have any of their lawyers been charged with assaulting judges for not agreeing with them in court? You can’t blame the abortionists and homosexuals. They don’t have the numbers. The atheists, Jews and Muslims are an extremely small minority. Racists would blame blacks; but blacks are a minority. Results of Coral Ridge Ministries’ 2008 Annual Spiritual State of the Nation Survey*[23]lays significant blame upon “Apathetic/uninformed Christians.” That appears to be consistent with Barna’s findings: “Americans Not Concerned About Their Spiritual Condition.”[24] Those claiming that religion, or lack thereof, makes no difference in government prove the point previously made.
Consider what Orthodox Jewish rabbi, Daniel Lapin, had to say several years ago:[25]
“Those of us who venerate freedom, be we Jewish or Christian, be we religious or secularized, have no option but to pray for the health of Christianity in America. No other group possesses both the faith and the numbers sufficient to hold back the ever-encroaching, sometimes sinister, power of the state.”Untold millions have experienced the sinister power of the state at the hands of evil women murdering their own children. State government exists to restrain evil by enacting laws that the President and Congress allow federal courts to break. The next step is documented by Professor R.J. Rummel, verifying the legitimacy of Rabbi Lapin’s concern:[26]
Part of this reluctance to call a government or its ruler a murderer comes from the fact that to do so is a new and strange thought. Democide is a black hole in our textbooks, college teaching, and social science research. Few people know the extent to which governments murder people. In the twentieth century, the age of great advances in technology, medicine, wealth, and education, governments nonetheless probably murdered over 170,000,000 people, the worst of these murderous governments are listed in Table 6.1 here.1 This is more than four times those killed in combat in all international and national wars, including world wars I and II, Vietnam, Korea, the Mexican Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Civil War. The toll could even be more than 300,000,000. This is as though we had a nuclear war, but with its deaths and destruction spread over a century. Yet few know about this obscene slaughter.Michael Paulsen, University Chair and Professor at University of St. Thomas School of Law, places the blame for the current state of affairs in America exactly where it belongs:[27]
The decision in Casey, reaffirming Roe and itself reaffirmed and extended in Carhart, in my view exposes the Supreme Court, as currently constituted, as a lawless, rogue institution capable of the most monstrous of injustices in the name of law, with a smugness and arrogance worthy of the worst totalitarian dictatorships of all time. The Court, as it stands today, has, with its abortion decisions, forfeited its legal and moral legitimacy as an institution. It has forfeited its claimed authority to speak for the Constitution. It has forfeited its entitlement to have its decisions respected, and followed, by the other branches of government, by the states, and by the People. The enthusiasm of liberal intelligentsia for the Court’s abortion decisions, the sycophancy of the law professorate, of the legal profession, and of our elected officials, and the docility of the American people with respect to our lawless, authoritarian Court rivals the pliancy of the most cowardly, servile peoples toward ruinous, brutal, anti-democratic regimes throughout world history. We suffer people to commit despicable acts of private violence and we welcome - some of us revere - a regime that destroys popular government for the sake of perverted, Orwellian notions of “liberty.” After a twentieth century that saw some of the worst barbarisms and atrocities ever committed by humankind, at a time when humankind supposedly had progressed to more enlightened states, we still have not learned. The lesson of the Holocaust - “Never Forget” - is lost. We fail to recognize the amazing capacity of human beings to commit unthinkable, barbaric evil, and of others to tolerate it. We remember and are aghast at the atrocities of others, committed in the past, or in distant lands today. But we do not even recognize the similar atrocities that we ourselves commit, and tolerate, today.NOTES & QUOTES
[1] http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=82 What was the basis of American Independence? John Adams said “The general principles on which the Fathers achieved independence were the general principles of Christianity.”
[2] http://nordskogpublishing.com/publisherscorner/2008/01/eidsmoe-john-doctrine-of-interposition.html The Doctrine Of Interposition In Christian Theology. http://www.wallbuilders.com/LIBissuesArticles.asp?id=128 Was the American Revolution a Biblically Justified Act? The Presbyterians, Lutherans, Baptists, Congregationalists, and most other Christian denominations during the American Revolution all believed that Romans 13 meant they were not to overthrow government as an institution and live in anarchy, but that this passage did not mean they had to submit to every civil law (note that in Hebrews 11, a number of those who made the cut in the “Faith Hall of Fame” as heroes of the faith were guilty of civil disobedience — including Daniel, the three Hebrew Children, the Hebrew Midwives, Moses, etc.). Furthermore, the Apostles in Acts 4-5 also declared their willingness to be civilly disobedient —they would obey God rather than their civil authorities.
[3] http://www.eagleforum.org/court_watch/alerts/2003/oct03/Eidsmoe-10-08-03.shtml A Call to Stand with Chief Justice Moore.
[4] http://www.constitution.org/rf/doc_98.htm The Doctrine of ‘98
[5] http://www.ccomcor.org/stateinterposition.htm State Interposition. http://www.lewrockwell.com/woods/woods44.html The States’ Rights Tradition Nobody Knows
[6] http://www.stephankinsella.com/texts/berger_incorporation_nine_lived.pdf Incorporation of the Bill of Rights in the Fourteenth Amendment: A Nine-Lived Cat (1981) http://www.stephankinsella.com/texts/berger_reply-to-curtis.pdf Incorporation of the Bill of Rights: A Reply to Michael Curtis’ Response (1983)
[7] http://media.hoover.org/documents/0817946020_1.pdf In sum, if opponents of government by judges should ever gain sufficient political strength to obtain a constitutional amendment, they should not use it merely to tinker with the method of selecting Supreme Court justices or of deciding their term of office or with the requirement of a supermajority vote for rulings of unconstitutionality. They should use it, ideally, to abolish judicial review altogether, or at least to give Congress the last word on constitutional questions. Most easily defended and perhaps politically feasible— if any Court-limiting proposal can be—would be simply to give the Fourteenth Amendment a specific meaning.
[8] http://www.stephankinsella.com/texts/berger_fourteenth_am_bill.pdf The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights (1989)
[9] http://www.utexas.edu/law/news/2005/052405_graglia.html Rule of Law: Our Constitution Faces Death by ‘Due Process’. The essential irrelevance of the Constitution to contemporary constitutional law should be clear enough from the fact that the great majority of Supreme Court rulings of unconstitutionality involve state, not federal, law; and nearly all of them purport to be based on a single constitutional provision, the 14th Amendment — in fact, on only four words in one sentence of the Amendment, “due process” and “equal protection.” The 14th Amendment has to a large extent become a second constitution, replacing the original. The problem is that the Supreme Court justices have made the due process and equal protection clauses empty vessels into which they can pour any meaning. This converts the clauses into simple transferences of policy-making power from elected legislators to the justices, authorizing a Court majority to remove any policy issue from the ordinary political process and assign it to themselves for decision. This fundamentally changes the system of government created by the Constitution.
[10]http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=675&Itemid=99999999 Government by Judiciary: The Transformation of the Fourteenth Amendment [1977]
[11] http://www.billofrights.org/
[12] http://www.stephankinsella.com/texts/quirk-bridwell_judicial-dictatorship.pdf Judicial Dictatorship (1995).
[13] http://www.uscourts.gov/about.html The courts do not make the laws. That is the responsibility of Congress. Nor do the courts have the power to enforce the laws. That is the role of the President and the many executive branch departments and agencies. http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed78.htm The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; 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; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments. The celebrated Montesquieu, speaking of them, says: “Of the three powers above mentioned, the judiciary is next to nothing.’’ “Spirit of Laws.’’ vol. i., page 186. http://www.visionforumministries.org/issues/rule_of_law/the_rule_of_law_and_chief_just.aspx First of all, it’s unconstitutional. Judges are not lawmakers. The Constitution says in Article I, section 1 that all law-making power is given to Congress and none to the courts: “All legislative powers here in granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States. “The Constitution specifies the only means to an end is in Article V. It grants no power to amend the Constitution by judicial edict. The Constitution also makes clear in Article VI that Supreme Court opinions are not included in the supreme law of the land: “This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made inpursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby...”
[14] http://www.constitution.org/col/np/aas/050710_gra-lev.htm Altering 14th Amendment would curb court’s activist tendencies. The basic principles of the Constitution are representative democracy, federalism and the separation of powers, which places all lawmaking power in an elected legislature with the judiciary merely applying the tew to individual cases. Undemocratic and centralized lawmaking by the judiciary is the antithesis of the constitutional system.
[15] http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/presiden/veto/ajveto01.htm If the opinion of the Supreme Court covered the whole ground of this act, it ought not to control the coordinate authorities of this Government. The Congress, the Executive, and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution. Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others. It is as much the duty of the House of Representatives, of the Senate, and of the President to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution which may be presented to them for passage or approval as it is of the supreme judges when it may be brought before them for judicial decision. The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both. The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.
[16] http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/tocs/a1_2_5.html & http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/794205/posts IMPEACHING FEDERAL JUDGES:A COVENANTAL AND CONSTITUTIONAL RESPONSE TO JUDICIAL TYRANNY
[17] http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/judiciary/hju94458.000/hju94458_0.HTM#45 TESTIMONY OF MARTIN H. REDISH, LOUIS AND HARRIET ANCEL PROFESSOR OF LAW AND PUBLIC POLICY, NORTHWESTERN LAW SCHOOL
[18] http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed81.htm “The judicial power of the United States is’’ (by the plan of the convention) “to be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may, from time to time, ordain and establish.’’ We have seen that the original jurisdiction of the Supreme Court would be confined to two classes of causes, and those of a nature rarely to occur. In all other cases of federal cognizance, the original jurisdiction would appertain to the inferior tribunals; and the Supreme Court would have nothing more than an appellate jurisdiction, “with such EXCEPTIONS and under such REGULATIONS as the Congress shall make.’’
[19] http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/federal/fed82.htm It afterwards divides the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court into original and appellate, but gives no definition of that of the subordinate courts. The only outlines described for them, are that they shall be “inferior to the Supreme Court,’’ and that they shall not exceed the specified limits of the federal judiciary. Whether their authority shall be original or appellate, or both, is not declared. All this seems to be left to the discretion of the legislature. And this being the case, I perceive at present no impediment to the establishment of an appeal from the State courts to the subordinate national tribunals; and many advantages attending the power of doing it may be imagined. It would diminish the motives to the multiplication of federal courts, and would admit of arrangements calculated to contract the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. The State tribunals may then be left with a more entire charge of federal causes; and appeals, in most cases in which they may be deemed proper, instead of being carried to the Supreme Court, may be made to lie from the State courts to district courts of the Union.
[20] http://www.stephankinsella.com/texts/berger_federalism.pdf Federalism: The Founder’s Design
[21] http://www.pegc.us/archive/Unitary%20Executive/paulsen_myth_of_marbury_2004.pdf The argument for “executive review” — the power and duty of the President to exercise independent legal judgment and review of the validity of the actions of both other coordinate branches — is thus almost exactly parallel to the argument for judicial review set forth in Marbury. The President is bound by the Constitution. He is not bound by acts of other branches, where those acts are contrary to the Constitution, and he is not bound by those branches’ views concerning the constitutional propriety of their own acts, if indeed those views are wrong by the lights of the Constitution itself. Rather, the President possesses an independent power of constitutional review of the actions of the other branches in any matter that falls within the sphere of his governing powers as President under Article II of the Constitution.
[22]http://www.visionforumministries.org/issues/rule_of_law/edward_coke_and_righteous_inte.aspx Because of Coke’s uncompromising, unrepentant stance against unconstitutional judicial tyranny, the rule of right was officially recognized as the rule of law. Since the days of Sir Edward Coke, the legislative body of England has been recognized as holding an essential constitutional check against excessive executive and judicial power, a check that was later written into Article III of our own Constitution of the United States of America (1787).
[23] http://www.coralridge.org/specialdocs/2008ENDOFResults.htm How dangerous are the following to the spiritual health of America?
[24] http://www.barna.org/FlexPage.aspx?Page=BarnaUpdate&BarnaUpdateID=276 “Americans focus on what they consider to be the most important matters; faith maturity is not one of them. The dominant spiritual change that we have seen - Americans becoming less engaged in matters of faith - helps to explain the surging secularization of our culture.” http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58959 Hillary gets standing ovation at Rick Warren’s summit. http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=53134 Christian leaders to Warren: Keep Obama from pulpit.
[25] http://www.visandvals.org/VISION_&_VALUES__A_Case_Study_in_Christophobia.php VISION & VALUES: A Case Study in Christophobia
[26] http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/WF.CHAP6.HTM By shooting, drowning, burying alive, stabbing, torture, beating, suffocation, starvation, exposure, poison, crushing, and other countless ways that lives can be wiped out, governments have killed unarmed and helpless people. Intentionally. With forethought. This is murder. It is democide.
[27] http://www.stthomas.edu/law/faculty/bios/paulsenmichael.htm Michael Stokes Paulsen, The Worst Constitutional Decision of All Time, 78 Notre Dame L. Rev. 995, 1003-1007 (2003).