The Courts - The Constitution - The Threat

by

       M. Richard Maxson

         with comments from Christopher Scalia

      To complete the “fundamental changing of America” the plan was set. After years of ignoring the Constitution (because it is an obsolete document) the end game was to put Hillary Clinton in the White House and begin replacing Supreme Court justices that were originalists with left-leaning activist judges. The lower courts were already teaming with these appointees. Their campaigns financed by money from those who do not like the current United States and it's laws. Changing, restricting, and replacing the Constitution is the end game.

  

      That all came to a crashing halt with the election of 2016. The rage that came out of the Left was and still is deafening. President Trump has now appointed two Justices and the Left is doing their best to keep Justice Ginsberg healthy until they can regain power and get the ball rolling again. They pulled every dirty trick they could think of and showed true Americans just how disgusting their political leadership could be. Justice Kavanaugh was confirmed yet the Left, soon to take control of the House, has stated they will continue to go after him via impeachment. They will go to any means to get the Supreme Court stacked with anti-constitutionalists.

      The Democratic party's main supporter does not sit still. He went to plan B. The logic is that the district attorneys are the ones who decide which cases to prosecute and bring before the courts – or not. Since they cannot yet control the courts, they can control what the courts decide. Buried in the MSM are headlines like these:

• Soros put nearly $1.7 million in Philly DA’s race

• Billionaire Soros Pumps $400K Into San Diego DA’s Race

• Billionaire George Soros Pours Money Into Alameda County District Attorney's Race

• Soros buys another district attorney race, this time in Texas

      This should terrify every American patriot. Chief Justice Antonin Scalia was a champion of the Constitution. He has gone and can no longer defend his country but his son has something to say about the state of our nation. Here are his thoughts:

      “Although I don’t think my father (or anyone) could have predicted the twists and turns of the past several weeks, I don’t think he would have been shocked by the no-holds-barred fight over a Supreme Court vacancy, either. He long ago warned Americans about the excessive intrusion of politics into the judicial appointment process. And he explained that a large share of the blame belongs to the justices themselves.”

      “My father believed that a major reason the judicial confirmation process has become so heated is that federal judges too often exceed the role envisioned by our nation’s founders and usurp the power of elected representatives. Alexander Hamilton famously argued “that the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power” and that “the general liberty of the people can never be endangered from” the judicial branch. But Hamilton qualified that claim. He said it would only be true as long as “the judiciary remains truly distinct from both the legislature and the Executive.” Hamilton agreed with the French political philosopher Montesquieu, who warned that “there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers.”

      “Maintaining that separation means limiting the role of judges. My father explained that for most of American history, Supreme Court justices recognized that the meaning of legal texts – including the Constitution – did not change. Judges understood that their job was to interpret that original meaning – referring to tradition, history and precedent when necessary. When dealing with laws and statutes, this approach is known as textualism; in reference to the Constitution, it is called originalism.”

      “But over the course of 20th century, judges began to think of the Constitution as a “living document” whose meaning changed with the times. That may seem like a reasonable idea at first; after all, the Constitution was written in 1787 and a nation’s interests and priorities can change dramatically over generations. Shouldn’t the Constitution keep up with the times? In fact, the Constitution establishes democratic processes, both in the states and in Congress, with the flexibility necessary to adapt to changing circumstances. This can happen through new laws and through constitutional amendments. That is, for example, how women earned the right to vote: not by judicial decree, but through the 19^th Amendment.”

      “On the other hand, if the Constitution is a living document, consider who ends up determining its new meaning: unelected judges with lifetime appointments – men and women who are intentionally protected from the will of voters at the ballot box. As a result, many debates and compromises that should have occurred in the political realm have been short-circuited by the judicial branch for decades.”

      “A freedom-loving people respectful of the rule of law may be expected to let lawyers decide what a constitutional text means; but they cannot be expected to let lawyers decide what a Constitution ought to say,” my father said. Or as he put it in another speech, “no court can expect to remain immune from severe political pressure ... if it assumes the role of inventing solutions for social problems instead of merely applying those solutions prescribed in democratically adopted statutory or constitutional text.”

      “One way to help make our judicial confirmation battles less polarizing, then, would be for judges to return to the more limited role they had held for most of our nation’s history: applying laws and statutes according to their text and interpreting the Constitution according to its original public meaning, using history, tradition and precedent as guides.”

      “This change in perspective is long overdue, but it will not happen overnight. Right now, it is primarily only Republicans who see the value in originalist judges like Justice Kavanaugh – and we saw the lengths to which Democrats fought his confirmation.”

      Constitutionalists know that federal judges have been increasingly usurping power from the Executive branch. Too many judges believe it is their right, their duty, to act upon their sympathies and policy preferences This judicial activism is a threat to our representative government and the liberty it secures.

Activist advocates want judges who will do for them what they have been unable to achieve at the ballot box. A judge can have personal opinions on whether a government policy is or isn’t heartless but they should decide legal questions based on the law and the facts—not their policy preferences.