I believe the country got to the right result with the 1964 civil rights act but by the wrong path. We are now faced with an arrogation of power by the executive which I can only describe as an usurpation. The only thing that stands between the president of the United States and the power by the flick of his pen to stop drilling for oil across the whole continent, is a federal judge. Soon, the president will be able to shut down the whole Internet. He can set Wages for whole swathes of our economy. In instance after instance the Congress of the United States has abdicated its responsibilities to legislate and passed the prerogatives over to the executive under a much expanded rule-making and regulatory power.
Unless we can undo these constitutional distortions at the ballot box, the only institution that stands between us and a growing tyranny is the judicial branch. The judicial branch is not there to do good and it is not there to advance the popular will. It is there to do constitutional justice.
Do we want to be ruled like the European Union by a host of bureaucracies like the Federal Reserve Bank, or the Atomic Energy Commission, and other agencies operating through unelected czars? Once a matter becomes a question of regulation the scope of judicial review is severely circumcised. The bureaucrat is unelected. The czar is unaccountable, except to Obama. Somehow, as a nation we must get these things straight: it is not the business of Congress to legislate whether every pump on every oil rig is safe, that is the job of a regulator and inspector. But it is not within the job description of the executive to declare all drilling in America to be too dangerous to continue, that is a prerogative of the Congress acting with the consent of the Pres. (assuming his veto is not overridden) and subject to being approved as constitutional by a third independent branch. That is the way the system is supposed to work. But we have confused the inspection of rigs and pomps with the regulation across the board of an entire industry. We have abandoned the legislative prerogative to the executive. That very same executive is trying now to stuff the courts.
It has been the pattern of the left seek a more receptive forum to get its way. It tries to move the issue from the local, to the state, to the federal,to the international arena. It tries to move the procedure from voting, to litigating, to treaty making, always seeking a method or a procedure by which it can impose its will. The court should be the guardian of the Constitution and it should be the responsibility of the courts to put the issue in the right forum and keep it there and it should be the responsibility of the court to measure the attempt against the Constitution and not against the new flavor of the week served up by the left to justify its predilections.
We now see with the last two appointments by Obama to the court that he has utterly no regard for these considerations, in fact, he has explicitly stated his view of the Constitution and how it should be twisted to accommodate a redistributionist view of the world. When the Constitution, like American politics, gets mixed up with race the Constitution often goes out the window. This has been true both for and against the plight of the African American for more than two centuries. This one more reason why I quote Nathan Bedford's maxim ad nauseam:
all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.
