Plain English

Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

Supreme Court justices write lengthy opinions to explain and justify their decisions.  Must they?  Or is that simply cover to placate the mob?
Suppose when the next gun control case comes up, Justice Kennedy is joined by the Liberals to make a majority and writes an opinion that says: “From this moment on, the Second Amendment means that only government agents are allowed to possess firearms and ammunition.  Because we said so, that’s why.  So waddya gonna do about it?”
Seriously, what would we do about it?  There’s no higher court to appeal to.  Congress can’t pass a law that trumps the Constitution, changing it requires a Constitutional Amendment and in this political climate, is there any real chance we could get Congress to adopt a proposed amendment reversing the decision and then convince 38 states to ratify it?
And if they did ratify a Constitutional Amendment that says “Every competent law-abiding adult has the right to possess firearms and ammunition,” suppose the Supreme Court said “The new Constitutional Amendment is unconstitutional and shall be given no effect.  Because we said so.”  What then?  Ignore the court?  Can’t – Liberals like Obama would send troops to confiscate privately held firearms in a heartbeat, if they thought the Court would let them get away with it.  Get Congress to impeach the justices?  See above political climate problem.

Liberal Justices write legal-sounding opinions to give cover to their social engineering but they wouldn’t have to.  They could be as blatant as they wanted and there’s no real-world thing we could do about it.  They are unelected dictators for life, imposing their views to the acclaim of popular media, from whose decisions there is no appeal: philosopher-kings, just as Mitch called them earlier. Kim Jong-un in North Korea wishes he had it so good.

I blame Madison for making the big power grab in the Marbury case.  I have no solution short of Constitutional Convention or another revolution.

Joe Doakes

Let’s shoot for “convention”.  It’s a bit soon for another civil war.

17 thoughts on “Plain English

  1. Do you beleive “gay marriage” should become a center piece for the Republican platform in 2016?

  2. We’ve lost on homosexual marriage. It would be a mistake to keep fighting on that specific issue.
    Now, how about civil rights for dissenters? A baker in Oregon was just fined $135,000 for refusing to participate in a homosexual wedding ceremony. And it wasn’t even a jury trial. It was a bureaucrat who made up the amount. A one-man Judge, jury and executioner. Is that the America Hillary wants us to live in?

  3. The Pilgrims started arriving in numbers around 1650 and lived under British rule until 1776 when the colonies declared independence from an oppressive and remote government – call it 120 years. The United States lasted until the 1860’s when the South and Indian nations declared their independence from an oppressive and remote government – call it another hundred years. Government hasn’t gotten less repressive nor less remote – by historical measures, we’re overdue for a civil war. The question isn’t “will it come” but “how long can we postpone it?”

  4. Joe:

    Wasn’t that the chief Justice of the US Supreme Court that made the power grab? Madison was the Secretary of state who was trying to refuse some of John Adams late appointments to take their seats and the US Supreme Court in ruling that Madison was okay in not letting the appointments take their offices in effect created the power to throw out laws as being unconstitutional.

    Walter Hanson
    Minneapolis, MN

  5. Joe, as anyone can tell you, when it comes to heated rhetoric I’m no shirker. But I’m telling you, I am genuinely concerned. If Hitlery gets elected, and if she, her terrified underlings or especially the SCOTUS go after Churches in any meaningful way (people are watching for legislation that takes away tax exemption), or, if the Second amendment is attacked I honestly believe things will get ugly.

    Fighting in the streets? Sure, probably. But what really worries me is, if large scale civil unrest begins, what terrorist act might happen to the brand new paint job I just had applied to my ‘vette?

  6. I used to feel that once the government goes to far, the population as a whole, including Democrats, will say “wait, this is nuts. We can’t go after churches and other bedrocks of society”.
    But I think we have passed the tipping point. A very large percentage of America is anti-Christian. And a very large percentage of the rest don’t care. The Atheist left is extremely aggressive. And do you think the old large protestant churches will give push back? These are the churches that are being exterminated in the mid-east, and all they see are evil Jews in Israel. I don’t think they will fight back here.

  7. And you say about Hillary and the Supreme Court. Look at all of those 5-4 decisions. All it takes is for one of the 4 reliable constitutional judges to go away and be replaced by another Wise Latina. Not to be overly dramatic, but all of those 5-4 decisions should have been 9-1 decisions (there will always be a Ruth Ginsberg on the court). These aren’t gray areas. We will have few rights under a court with just one more left wing extremist on it.

  8. “A very large percentage of America is anti-Christian. And a very large percentage of the rest don’t care.”

    There are a lot of people who are not ardent “church goers”, who none the less see the value organized religion has to society. There are plenty more that might not care about religion per se, but are already near the breaking point for other reasons. It wouldn’t take much to whip them up in defense of religion.

    I could be completely wrong, but I believe an attack on religion is a bridge too far.

  9. Some of those old large protestant churches are now left wing enclaves. I became inactive in my church when they called to ministry a pastor who was on the board of planned parenthood. They were already on board with using government to do good works.

  10. One constitutional amendment, non-partisan in nature: lower the thresh hold needed to pass a constitutional amendment from 2/3 to 3/5.

  11. Should it be easier to amend the constitution?
    Conservatives/libertarians want to amend the constitution to preserve existing rights.
    Liberals want to amend it to create new rights for their special interest groups.

  12. Would it require an amendment to give women the vote today? The threshold for amending the constitution is the vote of one man, Justice Anthony Kennedy. He needs a more democratic counter.

  13. Actually, all that is required here is to bring a case that forces the court to reverse its previous decision. Since they obviously vowed to political pressure rather than common sense Constitutionality, their recent overreach will create a backlash in public opinion that could quickly lead to such a reversal.

  14. I really think all the talk about obfuscation in court decisions is ridiculous. It’s not like the Founding Fathers put simple language like “the right to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” or “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.” into the Constitution, did they? And certainly they didn’t (King v. Burwell) note that “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States,….”, did they?

    Oh.

    Really, I think a lot of this has an interesting parallel in the Protestant doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture, that the average person can get the overall meaning from the plain text. I’m convinced myself that the Founders took this doctrine to Independence Hall with them when the Constitution was written.

    Somehow it takes an Ivy League education to make something as clear as the Constitution opaque to the world.

  15. Why I think Bible based Christianity will be on the run in the not all that distant future. The left isn’t saying “we need to get rid of Christians”. Well, actually they are, every day. But in the broader public debate they aren’t saying that. Instead they come up with an angle. “These so-called churches are discriminatory”.
    -To crush gay marriage opponents, they had to link homosexual marriage to black civil rights. So if you oppose gay marriage, you are just like the KKK.
    -Who would have thought, 30 years ago, that the Boy Scouts of America would be labeled a hate group that needs to be crushed. Or the Salvation Army. Or Catholic Charities.

  16. Walter, you’re absolutely right, thanks for the catch.

    Marbury was the guy appointed to a government job; Madison was the bureaucrat who held up the appointment papers; Marshall was the Chief Justice who made the power-grab for the Supreme Court.

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