Hijackers in Black Robes

Special to FreeRepublic ^ | [March 8, 2004] | John Armor (Congressman Billybob

[Gritty]

I agree with your sentiment, and we must start someplace. This place is as good as any to start drawing bold lines.

But this does not cure the deeper problem of judges simply ignoring the plain words and intent of the Constitution for their own nefarious ends. The Campaign Finance Reform Act, twisting of the "commerce" clause, and uncountable other wholesale perversions of the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th Amendments which all seem pretty clearly written - and just as clearly ignored - are examples, just for starters.

What makes you think these same Soviet-style judges will obey, rather than twist, the clause in your newly minted 28th?

No. There has to be available sticks against these judges and their putrid accomplises to go along with the succulent carrots of their lofty offices.

So far, I haven't seen the right ones, but I'm sure better minds than mine can come up with them. Impeachment hasn't proven to be a deterrent. Perhaps a combination of elections and term limits is? They are too far removed from the "will of the people" and have instead become an ongoing Constitutional Convention in their own eyes.

In any event, there has to be a quick and punishing alternative for their stepping all over the clear meaning of that Constitution. I don't think merely passing some additional twistable phrases in an additional Amendment will do it for very long.

[Old Dirty Bastiat]

How about congressional review of "legislation from the bench." If one source of legislation gets reviewed why not the other? Unconstitutional decisions could be stricken, just as unconstitutional laws are.

[tpaine]

Congressman Billybob:
First, why does a decision by a Massachusetts court present a national problem?
That's due to the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the US Constitution, which requires all states to recognize the official acts of other states. And a marriage certificate from one state is clearly represents an official act, when that couple travels to another state.

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Why does this apply to gay marriage and not to concealed handgun permits?
34 -R. Scott-


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You'll get no clear answer. -- Bet on it, -- bump...

[R. Scott]

Actually it was a rhetorical question. Our “esteemed” news media believes in gay marriage, but does not believe in personal self defense. “Our” elected representatives pander to the media.

[tpaine]

Billybob writes:

We have three branches of government. The legislative, which is elected by us, writes the laws. The executive, president or governor are also elected, and carry out or execute the laws generally. The judicial branch judges the cases of citizens who may have violated the law, civil or criminal.

It also judges cases in which the Legislative or Executive branches have overstepped their lawful Constitutional powers. Why did you omit this equally important function?

In most states and on all federal benches, the judges are not elected. They are the public officials most removed from the people, except in one way. Judges serve under the authority of state or federal constitutions, and a constitution is the most basic and enduring way that the people express their political decisions.

Indeed, - Constitutions supposedly protect our individual rights from overzealous politicians, if the judiciary are doing their jobs.

You see where this is headed. When judges decide to amend the constitution on their own, they are attacking the most basic political right that Americans have.

Judges haven't the power to amend. You know this, yet you keep demagoguing the issue.
When judges make decisions repugnant to our constitutions, our other branches of government are obligated to correct the matter, using their powers to check & balance.

In the Declaration of Independence it is expressed as "the right to Alter or Abolish their Forms of government."
In Article V, the amendment provisions, it is expressed as the power of two-thirds of Congress to propose, and three-fourths of the states to ratify, any change in the Constitution. Similar provisions appear in all state constitutions, usually including a referendum by the people. THIS is what judges are stealing when they arrogate to themselves the power to rewrite a constitution.

You seem to assume the constitutions check/balance system is broken. - Not so. -- The political system is broken.

That states the problem. What's the solution?

I say we change the political situation, not the constitution.

Of course, those with political aspirations prefer to increase the power of government, even to the point of altering it with unneeded amendments, -- as we see.
You want to become part of that problem John, rather than to solve it.

[tpaine]

R. Scott wrote: Actually it was a rhetorical question. Our "esteemed" news media believes in gay marriage, but does not believe in personal self defense.

"Our" elected representatives pander to the media.

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That was my point..
You asked your question of a man that has the hots to join that media driven system.

[R. Scott]

He can't be all that bad!

[tpaine]

We will soon see.

[DMZFrank]

Impeachment, nullification, interposition, and the use of Article III, Sec. 2 of the Constitution all need to be considered.

The marriage amendment should not be necessary. These actions by SF's mayor and the Massachutsetts judiciary are lawless and unconstitutional. We simply cannot amend the constitution every time the left decides to disregard it. We need to hold these officials accountable through impeachment, recall, nullification, interposition and arrest where necessary.

I am so seek of this endless deference to judicial tyranny.

When oh when will some elected executive officer in some state or federal capacity, in fulfilling his constitutional duty to honestly interpet the constitution (federal or state) just disregard the unconstitutional rulings of any court and dare the legislature to impeach him for it? When will some legislature impeach just ONE judge for an unconstitutional ruling?

To say that the courts have the final word on the constitutionality of a law NO MATTER WHAT THEY RULE is to say that the system of checks and balances envisioned by the founders does not exist any more.

Alan Keyes gave the best summation of this issue that I've heard yet. He said that every branch of government has a duty to honestly interpret the constitution. If the president honestly feels the courts make an unconstitutional and lawless ruling, then the president should disregard that ruling and refuse to enforce the provisions that he felt were blatantly unconstitutional. If the Congress felt the president was wrong in this decision, then it was their duty to impeach him for it. If the electorate felt that the Congress was wrong for impeaching the president or the failure to impeach him, they can remove them at the next election, as well as the president for any presidential actions that they considered wrongful. Congress can and should impeach federal judges for blatently unconstitutional rulings that manufacture law.

Lest anyone consider this formula has a recipe for chaos, then I submit to you there is no chaos worse than an unchecked oligarchic Judiciary. We are not living under the rule of law when judges make law up to suit their whims has they engage in objective based adjudication.

[Old Dirty Bastiat]

thanx, i was thinking maybe congress could have a finding of "judiciary legislation" and then rule on whether the JL was constitutional. Of course, JL is by definition an unconstitutional violation of the separation of powers. I think it would be tough to get the current senate to go along with it though.

[F.J. Mitchell]

And the Judiciary would just declare that action un-constitutional and rub the Legislature's noses as well as ours in it. It is going to take the kind of surgery that everyone dreads to think about, to reign in the run away activist judges. Legislators fear the can of worms that impeaching Federal Judges would open up. On the other hand, the can of snakes that the Judiciary has already opened up by legislating from the bench and ignoring the Constitution, may demand radical and untested surgery, if the patient is to have a chance at survival.

[inquest]

First, why does a decision by a Massachusetts court present a national problem? That’s due to the Full Faith and Credit Clause of the US Constitution, which requires all states to recognize the official acts of other states. And a marriage certificate from one state is clearly represents an official act, when that couple travels to another state.

Question: Are states truly required to accept marriages that conflict with their own laws?

To put the question another way, let's use an example other than marriage. Say two people in Tennessee sign a contract of a kind that's illegal in Massachusetts (I don't know, maybe a yellow-dog contract or something). If they move to Massachusetts, would Massachusetts be obliged to enforce this contract?

[Congressman Billybob]

There is a grey area in FF&C and I'll give two examples, one from contracts and the other from marital law. 1. A gambling establishment in a state where gamblig is legal, got a judgment there against a customer who had gotten credit to gamble, lost the money, not paid, and returned to his home state. Casino got a judgment, and then went to the gambler's home state to collect on the judgment, a state where gambling as illegal. Held: on public policy grounds the home state did not have to allow enforcement of that judgment. (Old case, I believe the casinos in Las Vegas have found a way around this result, in recent decades.

2. A couple who are first cousins marry in a state where that is permitted. Then they move to a state which forbids first cousins from marrying. Must that marriage be recognized as valid in the second state? Held: since the marriage was valid where entered into, it remains valid in the second state. This is the case on which the proponents of homosexual marriage will hang their hats as they fan out from Massachusetts.

John / Billybob

[inquest]

Thank you for that information. I can only note here that those two decisions (at least in their end results) are utterly inconsistent with each other.

Do you have the names of these cases?

[Congressman Billybob]

I'm on the road, and writing from memory. If you google "Supreme Court" + gambling + "Full Faith and Credit" you should get the first decision. Google again replacing "gambling" with "marriage" and you should get the second one.

If you want a whole bunch of cases, go on www.law.cornell.edu and do a search on "Full Faith and Credit." That should give you more cases than you can shake a stick at, in this area of constitutional law.

Cordially,

John / Billybob

[Congressman Billybob]

Your claim that no Justices will allow themselves to be bound by an "Interpretation Amendment" is too broad. I draw a distinction between Justice Ginsburg and Justice O'Connor, for instance. Ginsburg would not allow anything in the Constitution to interfere with her selected political outcomes in any case. O'Connor, in my judgment, is not that far gone. I believe that O'Connor would obey such a clause, if it became part of the Constitution by amendment.

Besides, the Members of the Court are getting close to "biological retirement." Without going into the details, I forsee that the Chief Justice and Justices O'Connor and Ginsburg will all announce their retirement within the next year. The question then becomes whether the replacement Justices for those will be asked and will say that they will "accept and apply the (new) Interpretation Clause."

Your suggestion of simply ending judicial review is wholely misplaced. I'va answered that argument in detail on other threads. Suffice to say, that principle was NOT created out of whole cloth by Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison. To the contrary, there are six state court decisions holding the same principle at the state level, handed down before the Constitution was written.

One of those six, Caton v. Commenwealth, was decided by George Wythe. Wythe was the first professor of law in the United States. His students included Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and Henry, among others. The Framers both knew and respected Wythe, and would have been aware of that important case decided by him.

Your general premise seems to be that no Justices can be forced to obey and enforce the Constitution, no matter what. If things really are that bad, then a written Constitution is irrelevant, and it is time to take to the woods with guns in hand. I do not believe that. Do you?

John / Billybob

[inquest]

I did some looking into that first-cousin business, and it seems there is no precedent as of yet requiring it to be respected by other states, unless it happened within the last eight years. According to a 1996 Washington Post article:

Generally, a valid marriage license from one state is valid in another. However, under a doctrine known as "conflict of laws," a state may reject the marriage license if it violates the state's strong public policy. In the past, such grounds have involved marriages of minors and certain familial unions, such as between first cousins.

[SevenDaysInMay]

Failure to remove the cancer of judges and other high officials who mock their sworn Oaths of office to usurp their servitude to our RATIFIED Constitution has ripened into this rotten fruit from the sick tree.

Federal judicial appointments are not for "life". That is mythology like any Constitutionality of judicially contrived, self-serving "compelling State interests" used to nullify inconvenient parts of our ratified Constitution, such as our Bill of Rights and 14th Amendment.

Undermining our ratified Constitution by "interpreting" our Constitution and proper laws away when they are inconvenient to "activists" agendas is nothing if not impeachable "bad" behavior, damaging to our social order and lawful society.

Fascism is merely criminally corrupt socialism. "Sovereign immunity" is their ticket to rule without cost. A corrupt judiciary is a requirement for fascism to take over a nation. Sovereign immunity" and "compelling State interests" are both feet in the door.

America is at an historical crossroads amid islam's declared Terror War and this is not about homo agendists perverting the only definition of marriage, to suit themselves and demean normals' marriages.

Either we stop the blackrobed or not political outlaws' Law of Rule or we fail our dying ratified Constitutional Republic, never to regain our Rule of LAW short of Declaration of Independence Jeffersonian armed revolution.

We must demand that our high officials obey our ratified Constitution or force them out of office with full loss of more than adequate pay and substantial perks and benefits AND near total power over us. We the People and the several states have the power under law to further limit the temporary lawful authority of our extra-Constitutional employees.

This matter is that simple.

Today we should limit federal judges/justices to terms no longer than 10 years, while impeachments proceed before this islamist Terror War further disrupts opur ability of self-government. Slavery to the dogma of stare decisis is wrong, when former rulings were outlaw. Over 70 years of usurping our ratified Constitution under socialist FDR and his wannabees has wrought tyrannical bench law ever more lawless.

Executive Order unConstitutional "Emergency Powers'" marshal Law is coming with islam's war crimes' plagues or nukes loosed upon our men, women, and children - for allah. Limited government pursuant to our ratified Constitution? Continuity of Government is too important. Our Federal Government is Borg, precedence is Lincoln's War of Northern Aggression circa 1861. Might is right as limited government is just too limiting. Meanwhile...

I refuse to stand by and be tyrannized by high officials who refuse to perform their limited job duties as designated in the very Law of OUR Land from which they derive any and all temporary lawful authority over us.

We are ruled by outlaws, acting under color of law - the most dangerous and contemptuous kind of outlaws as they use the force of overwhelming police powers of the State to impose "under penalty of law" upon us as they make up law without basis in law.

Judicial tyranny is now rampant and bullying us into post-commie fascism from which we can not peacefully return to liberty under law. More and more blackrobes are the leading pretorians mocking, perverting, and undermining the only Constitution we and they have - the only bilateral social contract these bullies use to tyrannize meek "commoners".

Blackrobes maybe as astonished that we obey their unlawful rulings as we are. Activist courts are in utter contempt.

Either we enforce our Constitutional Republic or we lose it, today. Yesterday is lost, as may be tomorrow.