Deep-Six Stare Decisis

A recent Scotus decision took a stab at the problem with Stare Decisis in our Constitutional republic. A Pennsylvania township law forced a landowner to provide public access to an old graveyard on her property. At issue was the Fifth Amendment, “nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation.” An open and shut case, right? Not according to the social justice wing of the Scotus. While the majority found the township’s law to be an unconstitutional taking, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor invoked stare decisis and stuck with unconstitutional precedent.

How did this unwritten principle, stare decisis, evolve into a code superior to our written Constitution? In fits and starts beginning in the 16th century, English jurists attempted to keep track of and catalog Parliamentary law, Crown decrees and judicial findings. The English, not having a written constitution, relied on past decisions, the common law. One legal historian described precedent as “the fiber of which the common law was woven, and English judges did not like to unravel the mantle of judicial authority.”¹ In kingdoms without a written constitution the stare decisis principle necessarily casts a wide net.

Yet something is very wrong when Supreme Court precedent, on the principle of stare decisis, supersedes the Constitution. The Leftist/Media complex know the rickety scaffolds of Scotus decisions, and not the Constitution or statutory law, buttress their spurious victories over the Constitution. Their Roe v. Wade decision is so awful that democrat congresses backed up by democrat presidents never pressed for a statute legalizing abortion across our nation. Wickard v. Filburn (1941) constitutionalized the New Deal and green-lighted the Administrative State, whose offspring, the Deep State, threatens our republican existence. The list goes on.

Just another Political pick and choose Decision making process.

If it was what they say it was we would still have Separate but Equal Laws on the Books.

Liberals use it as a Litmus Test up to the moment overriding an Unconstitutional Ruling works against them. Roe v Wade anyone?

When the SCOTUS reverses itself and decides that Firearm Ownership is not an individual Right, this Stare Decisis argument will be null and void.

I liken it to the Popular Vote movement to replace the Electoral College. As soon as a Republican wins the Popular Vote the Illegal State Popular Vote Compact will shrivel up and die.

My candidate for a precedent to be overturned is New York Times v. Sullivan. A unanimous decision by the Warren Court - but it is bad law.
In Sullivan SCOTUS held that judges can’t sue for libel, and politicians can do so, but only theoretically, not as a practical matter.
SCOTUS made that decision on the basis of an idiosyncratic case, and in a bygone (1964) era of 3 networks and belief in the objectivity of journalism. Not before SCOTUS in Sullivan were facts such as

journalism was then, and is now, monopolistic. “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion,” wrote Adam Smith in 1778, " but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Under the aegis of the wire services, especially the AP, all major US journalism has been "meeting together,” virtually, since before the Civil War.

The self-promoting propaganda campaign of journalism, promoting the conceit that 'journalism is objective’ is precisely "a conspiracy against the public” which produces ideologically homogeneous journalism.

For commercial reasons, journalism promotes bad news, which promotes cynicism towards society and naiveté towards the "antidote for all society’s ills," government.

Politicians who go along and get along with the ideological slant of journalism have an advantage over those who do not. Naturally, anyone with political ambition and without scruples against socialism will go along with journalism - and, consequently, get along with journalism. They will be flattered with labels such as “Liberal" and “Progressive." They will never be libeled.

”The freedom of the press” referred to in the First Amendment is freedom within existing limits on libel and pornography. The First Amendment - indeed, the Bill of Rights as a whole - was crafted precisely to prevent changes in government’s respect for the rights of the people (and the rights of the states). The right to sue for libel is clearly an unenumerated right of the sort referenced in the Ninth Amendment.
So while the Warren Court was, in Sullivan, waxing enthusiastic about its virtuous protection of freedom of the press, it trampled on the rights of non-socialist politicians to protect their own reputations in court. The Republican Party in general, and Steve Scalise in particular, should have been given their day in court to vindicate their rights to their own earned reputations. To think otherwise is to countenance appeals to the sword. Precisely what the Bible says government exists to control.

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