Justice Roberts Archives | Restoring Liberty

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The ObamaCare decision exposed the Supreme Court as an emperor without clothes. Hoping for deliverance from ObamaCare, many usual critics defended the Court. But with a new term fast approaching, a month before a critical election, Chief Justice Roberts’ handiwork should be remembered as a final wake-up call to consider, once and for all, whether the Court and judicial review merit respect, acceptance and legitimacy.

Upon Paul Ryan’s vice presidential selection, supporters noted his objection that Chief Justice Roberts had “contort[ed] logic and reason to come up with [the ObamaCare] ruling.” Such contortion is nothing unusual except for one thing. The Supreme Court, which normally operates in obscurity, could not escape a glaring spotlight this time, affording a rare opportunity to inform the public about the dark side of what many justices do. This raises questions concerning the utility of elections, what remains of our actual Constitution, the rule of law, and public acceptance of judicial review.

The Roberts opinion as well as attempts to defend it provide easily understood textbook examples of how justices have turned “interpretation” into a scam by manipulating words to mean anything in order to impose their will by authorizing what is constitutionally prohibited and prohibiting what is authorized or required.

Bluntly acknowledging, in order to challenge, the charge that Roberts is “a liar [and] coward,” devoted Roberts apologist Matthew Franck candidly clarified high stakes questions rarely presented to the public. Are all high court justices always honest? Or are many of them, often a majority, just politicians undemocratically, crassly and lawlessly imposing their personal morality based on misplaced public faith in them — blind faith similar to that once placed in witch doctors and medicine men?

If many justices are merely skilled charlatans distinguished from the latter solely by using far more sophisticated and incomprehensible mumbo jumbo, then what they do is illegitimate, their whole enterprise and institution are illegitimate, and they are not entitled to public trust and respect.

Read more from this story HERE.

It is fair to suggest that Congress came late to declaring a constitution day because for much of American history the Constitution was routinely celebrated on public occasions, most notably on Independence Day, when great orators like Daniel Webster and Charles Francis Adams spoke with reverence of our nation’s founding document. The Constitution, usually along with the Declaration of Independence and a portrait of George Washington, hung on most schoolroom walls. Future voters who passed through those classrooms may not have learned the intricacies of constitutional law, but they did enter upon their lives as citizens knowing that the Constitution is important.

But the passage of time and the remarkable success of our great experiment in government led to complacency and a casual assumption that mere citizens could trust government to respect and nurture a constitution designed originally to protect their liberties against inevitable violations by that self-same government. To be sure, the Bill of Rights (though not part of the original constitution) was not forgotten by mid- and late-twentieth-century activists, but the framers’ great structural design of divided government was largely abandoned to expediency and growing dependency on government.

In that regard, 2012 was not a very good year. The challenge to Obamacare presented the Supreme Court with its greatest opportunity in decades to begin restoring the vertical separation of powers that is true federalism. But the chief justice blinked. Though wishful advocates for liberty and limited government found solace in the majority’s conclusion that the Commerce Clause has limits, the reality is that the power to tax is now an unlimited power to regulate. The powers the Supreme Court has now constituted will permit Congress to do whatever it has the political will to enact. The emperor has no clothes. The Supreme Court has no robes.

But we should not allow Constitution Day 2012 to be a day of mourning. The Constitution is not yet a dead letter. The ingenious framework of horizontally and vertically divided authority; the careful and narrow enumeration of congressional powers; the Tenth Amendment declaration that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people”; the Bill of Rights, including the Ninth Amendment’s confirmation that (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”; and the proposition that (again in the words of the Declaration) “governments are instituted among Men” “to secure these rights” — all of that remains.

What is missing is the resolve to put principle ahead of politics, to put liberty and responsibility ahead of dependency and entitlement.

Posts

Supreme Court Justices: Skilled Charlatans, Undeserving of Public Trust & Respect?

Constitution, Down But Not Out