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I rarely disagree with my father in regards to politics, but I'm usually somewhat to the right of him when it comes to a lot of the reasons that cause us to come to the same conclusions.

On the Terri Schiavo case, we disagreed... not on her right to life, but on the intended powers of the judiciary, and the powers of the executive and legislative branches.

My father is a lawyer, and a good man. He does sit on the bench from time to time as a judge, when the courts are short and need someone to fill in for when a judge is on vacation. Because of this, I believe his perspective has been narrowed to the reality of the situation.

I however am not a lawyer (at least not yet anyway), and I don't have the inside perspective, and many years of experience that would embed certain habits and thoughts to color my perspective.

I have studied government. I have read the Florida Constitution... the parts that pertain to the powers of the governor and the statutes that cover guardianship.

What our country currently suffers from is a lack of perspective. A lack of perspective encouraged by the entrenchment of law into our everyday lives. Contracts for just about everything govern how we shop, pay our bills, go on vacations, and every other detail of life that we can partake in. It should be a required course in high school... Contract law. It really is quite enlightening.

But that isn't really the whole problem.

The lack of perspective permeates our judicial system, our elected governments, and our homes because we have been conditioned to accept the courts' authority over law enforcement.

When I suggested to my father that the governor could ignore a court order, he said that it could not be done. I still disagree with him. So long as the executive branch and legislature are in accord, the judicial branch would be powerless to hold the governor in contempt. As the commander in chief to the Florida National Guard, and the head of all county and state law enforcement officers, the governor would be required to enforce the contempt of court order on himself, and why would he do that?

So why didn't Jeb Bush challenge the court by ignoring their court orders?

Simply because he couldn't.

It is a matter of insufficient precedent to make a radical departure from the current perspective, to a new perspective that ironically would take America several steps backward in perspective to a time when the judiciary was exactly as described by Hamilton.

The result is an entire legal culture that treats the courts as if the courts, not the executive branches of governments, hold the power to enforce the law and the judicial decisions.

It is long past time for the executive branches in the states to reclaim their duly assigned powers under their constitutions, but it is entirely up to us to support this movement by electing strong, conservative governors - and the legislatures they'll need to back them up when it comes time to face down the judiciary.

In the mean time, getting strict constitutionalists and strict interpretationists appointed to our courts is just as important because we'll need these people in place to affirm the separation of powers, returning the power of law enforcement to the executive branches, and in cases where our judges are overruled or out numbered, to write the dissenting opinions as to why the liberal, activist judges are wrong to oppose affirming the constitutional assignment of law enforcement powers to the executive branches.

The Florida legislature and the Florida governor do not support the Florida judiciary in its deplorable determination to have Terri Schiavo starved and dehydrated to death.

Yes they both did. They both passed and signed into law the statute that lets a person's feeding tube be removed. This was in 1999.

Fellow Freeper starsandstripes sent me a timeline email that contained the following:

Statute 765 revisions of 1999. Someone commented that Statute 765 seemed to have been intentionally revised in 1999 for Terri's case. Terri is being held at Woodside Hospice, part of the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast. Michael Schiavo's attorney, George Felos was once on the Board of directors of the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast and was also once chairman of the hospice.

Although George Felos lied and misled the public that he had left the hospice at the time he took Michael's case, it turns out, from examining public records that he did not leave until 2001. In 1998, Felos filed a motion in Judge Greer's court to remove Terri's feeding tube.

In 1999, statue 765 was revised to redefine what a terminally ill patient was, and changed the law to withdraw nutrition hydration from a patient in a persistent vegetative state who had no advanced directives.

This is the real "Terri's Law." And no one is talking about it. I am certain it will not be repealed; instead it will be modified to allow a more merciful form of death.

It is clear that measures need to be taken to reign in the judiciary.

First and foremost, Congress and the several states should enact civil rights legislation which provides that no court can take any action which results in the death of a human being (or at least a U.S. citizen) without a jury trial.

There was a reason the nobles back in the day of the Magna Carta insisted on jury trials as a right in criminal matters, and there is a reason the right got extended to all of us by the Constitution. There is a reason the right is applied to many civil suits. And the same reason applied with equal force to cases like Terri Schiavo's: judges are agents of the state and as such are dangerous to liberty and to life itself. It turns out judges are self-corrupting, so the nobles' worry about judges being agents of the Crown and thus 'corrupt' from the point of view of defending their (the nobles') rights applies even to an 'independent' judiciary as relates to our rights.

Second, laws constituting and governing our courts need to be amended to define certain classed of judicial actions as misconduct and grounds for impeachment. For good measure (since we can't make the law ex post facto and impeach Greer or the judges up the line who backed him on the basis of a new law) the law should also forbid the use as precedent for future judicial decisions all past decisions which the law would define as misconduct.

...In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates...(snip)

- James Madison, Federalist Paper 51

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“...Particular misconstructions and contraventions of the will of the legislature may now and then happen; but they can never be so extensive as to amount to an inconvenience, or in any sensible degree to affect the order of the political system. This may be inferred with certainty, from the general nature of the judicial power, from the objects to which it relates, from the manner in which it is exercised, from its comparative weakness, and from its total incapacity to support its usurpations by force...”

- Alexander Hamilton

Federalist Paper 81: The Judiciary Continued, and the Distribution of the Judicial Authority

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The Federalist No. 51

The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments

...If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions...(snip)

In a single republic, all the power surrendered by the people is submitted to the administration of a single government; and the usurpations are guarded against by a division of the government into distinct and separate departments. In the compound republic of America, the power surrendered by the people is first divided between two distinct governments, and then the portion allotted to each subdivided among distinct and separate departments. Hence a double security arises to the rights of the people. The different governments will control each other, at the same time that each will be controlled by itself...(snip)

...In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates...(snip)

Justice is the end of government. It is the end of civil society. It ever has been and ever will be pursued until it be obtained, or until liberty be lost in the pursuit. In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign as in a state of nature, where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger...(snip)

---- James Madison