Constitution Killers

The American Spectator ^ | 3-3-05 | By George Neumayr

[hope]

Print Article         Close Window

Constitution Killers

By

Published 3/3/2005 12:09:11 AM

The Supreme Court's judicial activists are cutting off the branch on which they sit. By rejecting the law and putting their personal opinions in its place, the justices invite the people to imitate them and disregard their decrees with the same willfulness they disregard the Constitution. If Anthony Kennedy isn't bound by the framers' words, why are the people bound by his? The authority of Supreme Court justices derives from the authority of the Constitution: once they deny its authority, they deny their own. The Roper v. Simmons decision is a stunningly stark illustration of this despotism that masquerades as jurisprudence. Despotism is not an overwrought description here: we are dealing with a lawless court, judges who obey no law save their own will. Yes, they invoke a living Constitution, but that just means the real Constitution lies dead at their feet, having been trampled beneath a juggernaut of false progress. The Supreme Court has been holding a de facto constitutional convention for decades, ripping up the old one and writing a new one without the consent of the people. A fitting punishment for this act of hubris will come when the chaos that their own example of lawlessness has set in motion consumes them in impeachment trials or worse. The justices conceal their despotism in rhetoric and flat-out lying. As Antonin Scalia demonstrated in his dissenting opinion, the "national consensus" that the justices cite to justify the decision doesn't exist. Kennedy and company did a shoddy job of lining up this lie, first inventing a national consensus against executing 17-year olds, then conceding that it doesn't exist by whining about America's refusal to ratify international treaties that forbid the practice. As the Supreme Court writes a new constitution, the justices are using as their co-authors foreigners not Americans. This now routine reliance on foreign fashions illustrates their alienation from and distrust of the American people. In citing the "overwhelming weight of international opinion" in the Roper decision, the justices are in effect saying to the American people: we are right, you are wrong; since you won't support our boutique views, we will look abroad for support. The justices spoke of "evolving standards of decency," which means evolving standards of indecency. And they speak about these standards as if they are just reporting their existence rather than pushing them into existence through judicial decree. The judges are not neutral reporters of fact but agents of activism, full of elitist disdain at the American people for not changing the standards themselves. "Evolving standards of decency" in the world that the justices inhabit doesn't mean children aren't killed. It just means they have a better chance of surviving if they are guilty and dangerous. The resources the elite won't spend on unborn children they will lavish upon teenage monsters. Through some perverse inversion of values -- impossible to outline scientifically given the off-the-wall willfulness of liberalism -- unborn children can be killed according to the liberal elite's most crass utilitarian calculus imaginable while a 17-year-old menace is cosseted like a baby. The same judges who infantilize teen murderers encourage parents and schools to furnish teens with condoms, and should those condoms fail parents, according to judges, should let their teens, as responsible young people with searching consciences, decide on their own whether to apply evolving standards of decency to unwanted children growing within them during visits to their local Planned Parenthood. Nor is the posture of casting teens as innocent waifs one the justices ever strike in censorship cases. Indeed, a teens-know-best attitude runs through much of the Rousseauian Enlightenment thinking of the Court. From designing their own curriculum at New Age high schools to ruminating over the contraceptive menus supplied to them by administrators, teens operate like adults in the evolved culture that the Court seeks to spread. The Court's conveniently patronizing description of 17-year-olds in the Roper decision would have been news to Americans at the time of the Constitution's ratification: for them, many of whom didn't live to be 40, 17 was practically middle age. Since the justices maintain the practice of never consulting for the meaning of the Constitution the framers who actually wrote it, they made sure not to include in Roper the number of 17-year-old murderers executed at the time of the country's founding. The Supreme Court has zero interest in the America of the founders, indeed looks longingly to the Europe that the framers left for co-authorship in forming a new Constitution to supplant the framers' one. What Anthony Kennedy calls cultural evolution looks more like regression -- a return to the tyrannies of Enlightenment Europe. George Neumayr is executive editor of The American Spectator.

About Author

Subscribe

[Finalapproach29er]

Ignorance (and apathy) is killing this country.

[thoughtomator]

If the SCOTUS can't abide by the Constitution then on what basis do they claim to rule?

[goldstategop]

The Living Constitution - As Updated By Liberals.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[Jim Noble]

The appropriate constitutional response to judicial "interpretations" like Roper is to pass a Bill of Attainder against the justices.

Article I, section 9 forbids this.

Besides, a Congress which refuses its Article III, section 2 duty to regulate and make exceptions to the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court by simple majority is hardly going to start impeaching Associate Justices by 2/3.

That having been said, the power asserted by the Court in Kennedy's opinion is revolutionary, on a scale with Margaret Marshall's opinion in the Mass gay "marriage" case.

I do believe that eventually, force will be met with force-but it won't be Congress which delivers the response.

[Jim Noble]

The States need to ignore these idiots and just continue to march

Yes, it's a teachable moment, if only some Governor would sign a warrant of execution for one of the "children" spared by yesterday's pretended decision.

[goldstategop]

I'd like to see that happen. If the SCOTUS issues an unconstitutional decision, the executive doesn't need to obey it. I like President Lincoln's response to Chief Justice Taney: "He issued a decision? Let him enforce it."

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[Jim Noble]

Really, it would be great if the President and Congress were to pick one of these crazy decisions and publically declare it to be beyond the Constitutional authority of the Court and simply refuse to enforce it

You're on the right track.

But this case and this "decision" don't involve the President, or Congress (yet).

The Constitutionally correct thing to do is for the executive of one of the impacted States to issue a warrant of execution for one of the "children" covered by this decision, and then to see that it is carried out. If two or more States would act in concert, it would be better.

I agree that all USSC "decisions" which are without warrant in the Constitution are void, but if the People do not treat them as such, they will continue to metastasize throughout the body politic.

It is obviously illegitimate for this Court, or any court, to cite public opinion or emerging public consensus as the basis for rulings, when the public has a legitimate and fully functioning mechanism (electing representatives) for expressing such opinions and forming such consensus.

[goldstategop]

An act repugnant to the letter and spirit of the Constitution is void irrespective of the issuing authority. I find no warrant in the Constitution for the banning of capital punishment, especially on the arbitrary criteria of age. The SCOTUS could not cite a single constitutional provision for its edict. It cited an unratified treaty - but ignored the fact UNRATIFIED treaties are NOT the law of the land and brushed aside the fact the U.S government had specifically submitted a reservation allowing for the execution of juvenile capital offenders. If the Court chooses to ignore the Constitution, no else is required to pay heed to its rulings.

(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)

[kittymyrib]

The Supreme Court is now unconstitutional. It is a collection of 9 unelected dictators who tell the country what they want the rest of us to follow. They don't obey our laws, but cite the laws of other countries. This is not the way our founders perceived the Court. It needs to be reformed or abolished.

[Leatherneck_MT]

This is not the way our founders perceived the Court. It needs to be reformed or abolished.

I'd prefer to see the 5 majority decision makers hung for treason before it is abolished

I think the rest of the Federal Judges in this country would wake up and smell the coffee.

[The Spirit Of Allegiance]

EXCELLENT FIND. Thanks for posting. Legal Outrage = Ammo for the Culture War!

[wita]

Now there is a rhetorical question if I ever read one.

[wita]

I'd prefer...

Could we maybe start with a few people who call themselves senator?

[Leatherneck_MT]

Could we maybe start with a few people who call themselves senator?

Works for me

[NCSteve]

Apathy being the key word here. There will be a lot of huffing and puffing online and in the media among conservative pundits, but in the end, nothing will happen. As many have suggested, the death penalty will be declared unusable by this court before too long. That too will meet with overwhelming apathy and we will have slipped quietly into an oligarchy.

[hope]

"Really, it would be great if the President and Congress were to pick one of these crazy decisions and publically declare it to be beyond the Constitutional authority of the Court and simply refuse to enforce it, and in the process shatter forever the notion that the Sup Court can serve as a superlegislature that orders the other branches around."

I beleive Congress has the power to ask that the Supreme not rule on certain un-constitutional items....But, that would require a Republican with some backbone.

[Jim Noble]

I beleive Congress has the power to ask that the Supreme not rule on certain un-constitutional items....

Congress does not have the power to ask.

Congress has the power to command.

Article III, section 2: "In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make"

[wita]

Works for me

Somehow I knew it would.