Ted Cruz Ping! If you want on/off this ping list, please let me know.
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CRUZ or LOSE!
Posted on 06/26/2015 4:00:53 PM PDT by Isara
This week, we have twice seen Supreme Court justices violating their judicial oaths. Yesterday, the justices rewrote Obamacare, yet again, in order to force this failed law on the American people. Today, the Court doubled down with a 5–4 opinion that undermines not just the definition of marriage, but the very foundations of our representative form of government.
Both decisions were judicial activism, plain and simple. Both were lawless.
As Justice Scalia put it regarding Obamacare, “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State.’ . . . We should start calling this law SCOTUSCare.” And as he observed regarding marriage, “Today’s decree says that . . . the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.”
Sadly, the political reaction from the leaders of my party is all too predictable. They will pretend to be incensed, and then plan to do absolutely nothing.
That is unacceptable. On the substantive front, I have already introduced a constitutional amendment to preserve the authority of elected state legislatures to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman, and also legislation stripping the federal courts of jurisdiction over legal assaults on marriage. And the 2016 election has now been transformed into a referendum on Obamacare; in 2017, I believe, a Republican president will sign legislation finally repealing that disastrous law.
But there is a broader problem: The Court’s brazen action undermines its very legitimacy. As Justice Scalia powerfully explained,
Hubris is sometimes defined as o’erweening pride; and pride, we know, goeth before the fall. . . . With each decision of ours that takes from the People a question properly left to them—with each decision that is unabashedly based not on law, but on the “reasoned judgment” of a bare majority of this Court—we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.
This must stop. Liberty is in the balance.
Not only are the Court’s opinions untethered to reason and logic, they are also alien to our constitutional system of limited and divided government. By redefining the meaning of common words, and redesigning the most basic human institutions, this Court has crossed from the realm of activism into the arena of oligarchy.
This week’s opinions are but the latest in a long line of judicial assaults on our Constitution and the common-sense values that have made America great. During the past 50 years, the Court has condemned millions of innocent unborn children to death, banished God from our schools and public squares, extended constitutional protections to prisoners of war on foreign soil, authorized the confiscation of property from one private owner to transfer it to another, and has now required all Americans to purchase a specific product, and to accept the redefinition of an institution ordained by God and long predating the formation of the Court.
Enough is enough.
Over the last several decades, many attempts have been made to compel the Court to abide by the Constitution. But, as Justice Alito put it, “Today’s decision shows that decades of attempts to restrain this Court’s abuse of its authority have failed.”
In the case of marriage, a majority of states passed laws or state constitutional amendments to affirm the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. At the federal level, the Congress and President Clinton enacted the Defense of Marriage Act. When it comes to marriage, the Court has clearly demonstrated an unwillingness to remain constrained by the Constitution.
Similarly, the Court has now twice engaged in constitutional contortionism in order to preserve Obamacare. If the Court is unwilling to abide by the specific language of our laws as written, and if it is unhindered by the clear intent of the people’s elected representatives, our constitutional options for reasserting our authority over our government are limited.
The Framers of our Constitution, despite their foresight and wisdom, did not anticipate judicial tyranny on this scale. The Constitution explicitly provides that justices “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” and this is a standard they are not remotely meeting. The Framers thought Congress’s “power of instituting impeachments,” as Alexander Hamilton argued in the Federalist Papers, would be an “important constitutional check” on the judicial branch and would provide “a complete security” against the justices’ “deliberate usurpations of the authority of the legislature.”
The Framers underestimated the justices’ craving for legislative power, and they overestimated the Congress’s backbone to curb it.
But the Framers underestimated the justices’ craving for legislative power, and they overestimated the Congress’s backbone to curb it. It was clear even before the end of the founding era that the threat of impeachment was, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “not even a scarecrow” to the justices. Today, the remedy of impeachment — the only one provided under our Constitution to cure judicial tyranny — is still no remedy at all. A Senate that cannot muster 51 votes to block an attorney-general nominee openly committed to continue an unprecedented course of executive-branch lawlessness can hardly be expected to muster the 67 votes needed to impeach an Anthony Kennedy.
The time has come, therefore, to recognize that the problem lies not with the lawless rulings of individual lawless justices, but with the lawlessness of the Court itself. The decisions that have deformed our constitutional order and have debased our culture are but symptoms of the disease of liberal judicial activism that has infected our judiciary. A remedy is needed that will restore health to the sick man in our constitutional system.
Rendering the justices directly accountable to the people would provide such a remedy. Twenty states have now adopted some form of judicial retention elections, and the experience of these states demonstrates that giving the people the regular, periodic power to pass judgment on the judgments of their judges strikes a proper balance between judicial independence and judicial accountability. It also restores respect for the rule of law to courts that have systematically imposed their personal moral values in the guise of constitutional rulings. The courts in these states have not been politicized by this check on their power, nor have judges been removed indiscriminately or wholesale. Americans are a patient, forgiving people. We do not pass judgment rashly.
Yet we are a people who believe, in the words of our Declaration of Independence that “when a long train of abuses and usurpations . . . evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government and to provide new guards for their future security.” In California, the people said enough is enough in 1986, and removed from office three activist justices who had repeatedly contorted the state constitution to effectively outlaw capital punishment, no matter how savage the crime. The people of Nebraska likewise removed a justice who had twice disfigured that state’s constitution to overturn the people’s decision to subject state legislators to term limits. And in 2010, the voters of Iowa removed three justices who had, like the Supreme Court in Obergefell, invented a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.
Judicial retention elections have worked in states across America; they will work for America. In order to provide the people themselves with a constitutional remedy to the problem of judicial activism and the means for throwing off judicial tyrants, I am proposing an amendment to the United States Constitution that would subject the justices of the Supreme Court to periodic judicial-retention elections. Every justice, beginning with the second national election after his or her appointment, will answer to the American people and the states in a retention election every eight years. Those justices deemed unfit for retention by both a majority of the American people as a whole and by majorities of the electorates in at least half of the 50 states will be removed from office and disqualified from future service on the Court.
As a constitutional conservative, I do not make this proposal lightly. I began my career as a law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist — one of our nation’s greatest chief justices — and I have spent over a decade litigating before the Supreme Court. I revere that institution, and have no doubt that Rehnquist would be heartbroken at what has befallen our highest court.
The Court’s hubris and thirst for power have reached unprecedented levels. And that calls for meaningful action, lest Congress be guilty of acquiescing to this assault on the rule of law.
But, sadly, the Court’s hubris and thirst for power have reached unprecedented levels. And that calls for meaningful action, lest Congress be guilty of acquiescing to this assault on the rule of law.
And if Congress will not act, passing the constitutional amendments needed to correct this lawlessness, then the movement from the people for an Article V Convention of the States — to propose the amendments directly — will grow stronger and stronger.
As we prepare to celebrate next week the 239th anniversary of the birth of our country, our Constitution finds itself under sustained attack from an arrogant judicial elite. Yet the words of Daniel Webster ring as true today as they did over 150 years ago: “Hold on, my friends, to the Constitution and to the Republic for which it stands. Miracles do not cluster and what has happened once in 6,000 years, may not happen again. Hold on to the Constitution, for if the American Constitution should fail, there will be anarchy throughout the world.” We must hold fast to the miracle that is our Constitution and our republic; we must not submit our constitutional freedoms, and the promise of our nation, to judicial tyranny.
— Ted Cruz represents Texas in the United States Senate.
Ted Cruz Ping! The last two presidential election cycles for starters...
In post #13 I asked:
C’mon blowhard. Be specific. What is to be done to restore liberty?
What is your answer?
Those that are egging you and others here in the forum to accept that violence is the only answer are:
1) Attempting to incite people to riot and commit violent acts against others,
2) Using comments made in the forum in relation to using violence as evidence that the forum is populated and moderated by a radical fringe that is dangerous, possibly justifying the imposition of Martial Law,
3) Attempting to persuade those who seek civil means to a resolution that they are foolishly deluded.
The only thing that needs to be said to these provocateurs is “there is of yet no grant of authority, and we will have our authority in due time”.
As for the constant push to name a time when “just one good government was peacefully obtained from a tyrant”, the appropriate response is to name just one war against a tyrant that did not at first embrace a civil means to resolve conflicts. The delegates to the assembly in Philadelphia that ended up signing the Declaration of Independence were first focused on presenting their concerns to King George by letters pleading for consideration of those concerns. Even after King George replied that they would all be tried and hung by the neck upon conviction, the delegates continued on to implement the Declaration of Independence. And they were not all relaxed in a hall waiting to sign the Declaration. They would randomly stream in a few here and there because they were on the run in fear of their lives.
Now why would these original patriots, these delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence, why would they risk their lives over a ‘document’ that King George would ignore and attempt to hold them accountable with?
What was so special about a ‘document’? Why not just gather arms and cannon and fight like hell as was being done in Massachusetts (the fighting in Massachusetts was viewed as an illegal insurrection by both the Crown AND loyalist Americans in the colonies).
The answer is the ‘document’ served as AUTHORIZATION to do the things that needed to be done. It was read from every town square, why? Why not just send copies to King George by courier and be done with it? Because Americans loyalists needed to understand that their countrymen were now AUTHORIZED to make war against the Crown.
So before the provocateurs attempt with their invective to paint this forum as one characterized by right-wing domestic terrorists, we will pursue our AUTHORIZATION with a ‘document’ via Article V.
If our Article V ‘document’ is torn up by the Feds, even as it is designed to be administered and enforced by the States, then we organize resistance.
First things first.
And I don’t see the Feds taking up arms against the citizenry especially if the States have an amendment document granting them AUTHORITY to rein in the abuses of the Federal Government. I would expect that even the National Guard soldiers would disobey orders to attack; it could be much like the Velvet Revolution of the Czech Republic.
Remember that Obama and his hard-core left will be looking for any PRETEXT for imposing Martial Law as his term heads down the final stretch.
Can we get an Article V amendment soon? Yes we can. Proposal and ratification could take but a few months if a consensus for urgency emerges. The rulings of this last week have without doubt upped the urgency to push faster.
I’ll have John Adams again answer you. Not only was he historically astute, he was also biblically adroit and understood a truth most refuse to accept:
“But a Constitution of Government once changed from Freedom, can never be restored. Liberty once lost is lost forever. When the People once surrender their share in the Legislature, and their Right of defending the Limitations upon the Government, and of resisting every Encroachment upon them, they can never regain it.” - John Adams, letter to Abigail 1775
I didn’t query JA. I asked you.
Thank you Hostage.
You are the only person who has intelligently and wonderfully explained the best hope and purpose of an Article V addition of Amendments.
I have no hostility towards the effort contrary to assumptions made. I asked the legitimate question that if the current Constitution can be ignored and circumvented by the oligarchy and the Rulers, how can anyone assume new Amendments are going to restrain those who now daily reveal their tyranny? The knee jerk reaction to the question is nothing short of the same kind of thing we see with those pushing the Leftist agenda.
I simply caution those who see that process as our salvation and restoration as no different than those who declare a politician to be our salvation.
I think the idea is one that will prove to be another lesson in futility because we are dealing with men in power without regard to law or morality beyond the new morality they are creating as superior to what we were once governed by.
Your answer is one I can support the effort towards, but I would advise that this people understand who and what they are up against - and have contingencies prepared for what happens if and when the efforts are thwarted or ignored.
You gave the only proper answer most who are doubtful of the success of the effort need to hear, and I offered it earlier but it was missed.
You and I will disagree on whether or not this regime will use brutal force against the citizenry. They are already doing so - like wolves picking off sheep via their alphabets.
The Homosexual Marriage deal is yet one more tool in the arsenal to criminalize and punish the very people they are declaring ‘monsters’ and ‘terrorists’ in their propaganda papers of record.
My answer is the same as Adams’.
Well done.
By the way, I’ve been an Article V skeptic until now. Now i consider it to be the next necessary and practical step. And I think the Court has just given it the boost it needed.
Especially when it’s the limits of federal power in question. They won’t seat you on a jury if you know the judge, the defendant, any of the attorneys, etc. Yet we’re supposed to accept that questions of the limits of federal powers may be decided by a branch of....the feral government! D’oh!
I agree. The court is reading things into the constitution that are not there.
He shares the same weakness as many moral superheroes - he’s trying to stay within the rules / lines / boundaries, which the bad guys don’t obey but readily remind the good guys of in the hopes of constraining them.
Bookmark
That is why I favor a solution with two components: first, it must be a solution fully capable of being invoked outside of Washington; second, it should be self effectuating, in other words, some sort of binary action must occur, some entity or other must review the Supreme Court's decision up or down. If it is Congress, blustering politicians would at least be compelled to cast actual votes on the record which is of some marginal value. If it is a review by states requiring, for example, 3/5 to overturn a Supreme Court ruling, it would take the matter out of Washington. But will the state be compelled to vote? Would Congress?
How much value there would be in such a constitutional amendment merely by compelling justices to look over their shoulders is difficult to know in advance. We are seeking structural remedies that cannot easily be evaded by a political class which has made evasion an art form. Yet, history has emphatically taught us that seeking remedies at the ballot box under the existing system will simply avail nothing. Seeking more of the same over and over is not working. If we could energize the electorate to discipline congressmen who fail to control federal court jurisdiction we would not need such an amendment but we simply can't.
Let me take this occasion to express some general observations about the current state of play.
Clearly, the road will be long and tortuous with many an IED hidden along the way. Support from the conservative side is obviously not unanimous. Some conservatives are motivated by concerns which deserve to be considered and seriously addressed but some who object from the right entertain motives which are selfish in the extreme. I would put the opposition by the NRA in the latter category because that organization would see the whole Constitution and the whole Republic lost because it has an unfounded fear of a threat to the Second Amendment.
him him and Such a fear is unfounded because of the arithmetic which says that of 99 state legislative bodies only 13 Houses from different states would be required to stop an attack on the Second Amendment, or to stop any liberal proposition. Republicans control the vast majority of these state legislative bodies. Therefore, those who fear a runaway convention are voicing fears which are entirely unfounded. In the case of the NRA, they are exploiting those unfounded fears. Additionally, there are those who crave a showdown, they want a civil war now. They disguise their motive with other objections which they repeat it every new thread by simply ignoring the responses such as the arithmetic cited above. The pattern is repeated over and over again.
So the downside is contained but what about the upside? This raises the often heard objection that dissembling politicians in Washington who have made an art form of evading our existing Constitution will continue to evade an amended Constitution, so why try? Process or structural amendments are difficult to evade and the object should be to get that sort of reform enacted. Besides, to remain inert is the counsel of despair.
It is my subjective, visceral estimation that no serious reforms will be enacted absent some sort Of "Black Swan" event which so energizes the electorate that they are actually willing to consider real reforms. I cannot foresee what such an event might be, that is the definitional meaning of "Black Swan" after all. However, some obvious history changing events might include a financial crisis, a war, a series of terrorist attacks, a major political upheaval such as corruption at such a level that leads to the impeachment of a president, a serious plague, cyber attacks which seriously threaten the population, or simply falling off the cliff of our own debt.
It is important to understand that the left will not be passive, rather they will be determined not to let a good crisis go to waste and we can expect them to use any dislocation to advance tyranny. I have no doubt that the left will have more contingency warmaking plans than does the Pentagon to roll out in the event of a national crisis. Will we conservatives be prepared? If history is a predictor, we will not be prepared because it is in the nature of conservatives to attend to their families and their livelihoods and not to seek secular salvation in politics. We are more likely to repeat our posture of passive reaction than to show a new proactive side. That is one of the major problems in securing any reform from the right and Article V is not excluded from this historical reality just because we would like it to be so.
Reforms have not been enacted to date because it is in the interest of the political class to fail to act those reform. They have constituents who vote and constituents who fund them and recent events have demonstrated beyond doubt that, at least on the Republican side, the interest of those two constituent classes clash. The structure favors constituents who fund politicians over constituents who merely vote or who refrain from voting. So long as our economy muddles along and so long as the treasury has enough borrowing power to hand out bread and circuses to the 47%, the electorate is unlikely to bestir itself, to educate itself, or to insist on real reforms. If campaign money wins elections over the interests of an uninformed electorate, politicians will govern in the interests of their constituents who fund them and campaign by pandering. The media will not cooperate at all. Nathan Bedford's first Maxim of American politics, all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial, must be taken into account and we can expect that every serious reform will be labeled racist. This is not new but these problems are increasingly acute.
I do not advocate Article V reforms because I think getting reforms done will be easy, to the contrary I think it will be extremely difficult. Our duty as conservatives, as patriots, is to soldier on.
> “You are quite right, Congress has the power to bring the Supreme Court and inferior courts to heel simply by withdrawing jurisdiction. The fact that this remedy has seldom if ever been resorted to by Congress tells us why we have submitted to a kind of judicial oligarchy. This constitutionally afforded remedy as not been invoked partly because Congress wants to be relieved of the responsibility to make these decisions. “
I think we may be going off on a tangent that is not realistic or feasible. Congress may withdraw jurisdiction not by decree but by managing appropriations. I do not believe there is any direct power by Congress to establish jurisdiction by decree. The Constitution expressly uses the term ‘regulation’ which stems from law and creating law is a process that involved both legislative and executive branches. I’ve never seen Congress make regulations by direct decree. I’ve seen resolutions but these are not binding on other branches unless as motions they are introduced in legislation that moves and completes as law. That’s not to say that resolutions cannot be influential; they may in fact compel other branches and agencies to initiate conforming policies of their own accord.
As all appropriations involve revenue, necessarily the revenue bills must originate in the House, pass the Senate and be signed by the President. This is how FDR was able to get the Supreme Court to back down when threatened with expanding their membership with persons that were sympathetic to his agenda (stacking the court).
Part of the reason I am a strong supporter of Ted Cruz is because he and his staff do the necessary work to introduce legislation independent of conditions of success but rather based on principle. Given that Ted Cruz knows the Constitution practically better than any living human being, it would be expected that he would call on Congress, in this case the House. to introduce amendments to appropriations or he would attach riders or file Senate amendments to limit the jurisdiction of federal courts. But in any case the legislation would ultimately need to be signed by the President. So it seems as a non-starter although I would not be surprised to see such action be taken on principle alone.
When we see a President Cruz, then a movement for limiting federal court jurisdiction may become a reality as he may impel Congress to move in that direction and send him a bill.
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Hostage, I am strongly sympathetic with the COS's goals as outlined here, on the understanding that proposed amendments would be for a balanced federal budget, term limits, and limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal government. That last item is rather vague — what are the specific proposals for doing that?
A COS would be an historical first — no amendment to the Constitution has thus far been secured by that means. On my reading of Article V, a COS requires two-thirds of State legislatures to submit an "Application" to Congress for authorization to proceed; and then any proposed amendment must be submitted to State Conventions in three-fourths of the States in order to be ratified. What could go wrong there? What happens if you can't get three-fourths of the States to establish a convention? I have some skepticism that my home state would be willing to do this.
The writer of the article at the link you provided in your last wrote, "While some have expressed fears that a Convention of States might be misused or improperly controlled by Congress, it is our considered judgment that the checks and balances in the Constitution are more than sufficient to ensure the integrity of the process." Details please!!! If the checks and balances were actually working, then we wouldn't need a COS in the first place.
It sounds great, but "the devil's in the details."
Meanwhile, I would do all I can to urge my state legislature to be one of the 34 states necessary to convene the COS.
Hostage, I'd appreciate any further details you can provide re: the Article V Project. Thank you so very much for writing!
Roberts was explaining that the win (which he voted against) was decided OUTSIDE the Constitution.
Those that decided this was legal, which it was not, should be impeached for not upholding the Constitution. There is no accountability in the Department of injustice.
That is what I keep saying to those who want to call an article five convention. A government that ignores the current constitution is going to ignore any new changes unless they are of the sort that they are happy with.
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