“The Supreme Court has shown it no longer has the confidence of the people! The court has proven to be extremist! It has gone too far! It has stolen our sacred rights!”
“The courts have spoken! This is now the law of the land! Anyone defying the courts is a threat to democracy!”
These are not just quotes from last month’s Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade, or from raving Leftists, pro-aborts and Democrats. They have been on-going for 50 years and more. From prolifers between 1973 and 2022, and now we can reverse the quotes from both sides of the abortion issue.
Whaddya know? We found some common ground after all!
But wait. No, since the beginning of the earliest days of the U.S. Constitution, and pretty much continuously, the courts were correctly seen as possessing the potential of destroying our liberties. The problem is, it depends on whose ox is being gored. Whenever a law is passed, or a decision is made that pleases our particular side, we are perfectly willing to accept it, the Constitution be damned.
And damned if it hasn’t been.
It is an imperfect system, an imperfect constitution created by imperfect men and implemented for generations by imperfect leaders.
Disobeying the Constitution is an art form, and began with Alexander Hamilton and George Washington. Remember, our Founding Fathers were human. We can pick their good moments and quotes, and learn from their mistakes. Hamilton was an early liberal, eager to expand the powers of government, and may have been either blind to his earlier writings in The Federalist Papers, or was a sneaking weasel who dropped his pretenses once he gained Washington’s ear as Secretary of the Treasury. The evils of an unconstitutional national bank live on today in the unconstitutionally contracted privately-owned Federal Reserve.
From Jefferson: You seem to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps … Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.
From Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address: The candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal. Nor is there in this view any assault upon the court or the judges. It is a duty from which they may not shrink to decide cases properly brought before them, and it is no fault of theirs if others seek to turn their decisions to political purposes.
So, what Alito did with the Dobbs decision was to bring the court into its proper and limited sphere, at least insofar as the abortion issue. But hold on: I contended in a recent column that it went into a realm that was out of bounds in striking down New York State’s gun control laws during the same week. Now, I liked their decision expanding the right to keep and bear arms, but that doesn’t mean it was constitutional.
Yes, we live in a time of Great Reset, but we can turn it on the Leftist’s heads.
In the same way that the recent federal gun control laws were unconstitutional when passed by the Democrats and RINOs, the court’s misreading of the 2nd Amendment is dangerous. It is still claiming the false premise that the courts can strike down state laws. And lo and behold, the Democrats in New York state have – ta-da! – rediscovered state nullification! If New York has a state constitution that protects gun rights, let them hash it out.
We might expect that the new conservative majority of the courts might strike down that new federal gun control law as unconstitutional. This they have the right to do, but it is going to depend on the executive prerogative to enforce it. We read in Federalist #78, penned by the at-the-time limited government weasel Hamilton: The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.
Trust me, should the supreme court rule that the recent federal gun control law is unconstitutional, Biden and the liberals will discover the angle that Andrew Jackson used in the Worcester v. Georgia decision in 1832: “John Marshall has made his decision. Now let him try to enforce it.”
You might say, then, what is the remedy? We will wind up chasing our own tails between the courts, the Congress and the president!
Well, that is what has been happening for 250 years, folks. If you think we are in a mess now, you should consider what happened between 1861-65. The shredding of states’ rights and 625,000 lives is as apocalyptic as it gets. Or 64 million in the abortion genocide. It is an imperfect system, an imperfect constitution created by imperfect men and implemented for generations by imperfect leaders.
ALASKA WATCHMAN DIRECT TO YOUR INBOX
Properly understood, the states are sovereign. They are the ones who ought to be deciding their local issues. This, too, is an imperfect system. Slavery, abortion, forced public education, income taxes, gun control – ad infinitum – are all evils. The best we can do is to keep it localized. If you want a perfect world, then, you must wait for the Divine apocalypse, not the Marxist one, which is a proven failure strewn with mass murder and state slavery.
But governments have limitations. The true transformation of a culture belongs elsewhere: with religions, artists, essayists, novelists, playwrights, poets and preachers. If you don’t like them, consider that the alternatives are riots, bayonets, torched cities, concentration camps and civil war.
Alaska is no different, of course. That is why we need a constitutional convention to correct our own flaws, clarify the gray areas of jurisdiction, and cite the federal tyrannies of unconstitutional powers by the federal government that we ought to have never accepted.
Yes, we live in a time of Great Reset, but we can turn it on the Leftist’s heads. Let’s make it a proper reset, not a Marxist one, but one that follows the Natural Law of God and the original intent of the Constitution.
The views expressed here are those of the author.
