Some people are bird-watchers; I have become a “court-watcher.” Why? Because I believe one of the gravest threats to America is judicial tyranny. I look at lower federal court and U.S. Supreme Court rulings to see what shape our liberty and freedom are in, and right now we’re in critical condition. With every court ruling that infringes on Americans’ God-given rights, our nation’s pulse drops, breathing slows, and death draws nearer for Lady Liberty.
But then, the death of a nation is nothing new. History is littered with once good and great peoples that have seen their day. And there is one common theme about the demise of each. Each one rejected its core principles: the values and worldview that once made them great.
I’m not willing, though, to surrender our great land to the tides of history, and I hope you’re not, either. Although I’m convinced we can restore America’s health, one of our once-great institutions—the United States legal system—stands in the way.
Our Courts—Not Just for Justice Anymore
America’s recovery will begin only when brave men and women are willing to make sacrifices—as did our Founders—to break free from tyranny. Except this time, the tyrants we face come not from across the ocean but from across town at the local federal courthouse and from the U. S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. The tyranny of which I speak has grown out of a justice system that no longer simply applies the law but usurps the power of our legislators by making laws from the court bench.
“Judicial tyranny” describes what I believe is the unconstitutional, immoral, and deliberate actions of judges to reject the intentions of our nation’s founding documents and the Founders’ original purposes and, instead, to force on our nation their own political, philosophical, and theological worldviews.
A Judgment Day for Judges
Judges who confer alarming and unconstitutional decisions on the federal bench should be impeached, as provided for in the Constitution. These justices have usurped the powers of our legislators and have become unelected lawmakers—an unarguable violation of the role laid out for federal judges by the U.S. Constitution. To commit such a violation means a judge has broken his or her sworn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
This course of action by our judiciary is no innocent drift in legal interpretation. The judges’ unconstitutional moves have been calculated by a few to thrust their will upon Americans while the U.S. Congress has been asleep at the switch, seemingly unaware that the legislators’ very reason for existence is being chipped away.
Benjamin Cardozo, appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1932, proudly proclaimed a belief in his right to usurp powers of the U.S. Congress and to violate the check-and-balance separations of the U.S. Constitution: “I take judge-made law as one of the existing realities of life.” (Footnote #1)
Cardozo not only held the U.S. Constitution and U.S. Congress in contempt; he saw little purpose for people of faith—which includes most Americans—who want to apply a moral law as foundation for the legal process: “If there is any law which is back of the sovereignty of the state, and superior thereto, it is not law in such a sense as to concern the judge or lawyer, however much it concerns the statesman or the moralist.” (Footnote #2)
Justice Cardozo was not the first to sound this theme. In 1907, Charles Evans Hughes, who would later become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, declared, “We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is.” (Footnote #3)
Lino Graglia, professor of constitutional law at the University of Texas School of Law, explains the crisis caused when members of the judicial branch make policy:
[quote] Judicial usurpation of legislative power has become so common and so complete that the Supreme Court has become our most powerful and important instrument of government in terms of determining the nature and quality of American life.
The result is that the central truth of constitutional law today is that it has nothing to do with the Constitution except that the words “due process” or “equal protection” are almost always used by the judges in stating their conclusions. Not to put too fine a point on it, constitutional law has become a fraud, a cover for a system of government by the majority vote of a nine-person committee of lawyers, unelected and holding office for life. The desirability of this form of government should be the central question in any realistic discussion of judicial review today. [End Quote] (Footnote #4)
How can judges fulfill their sworn oath to defend and protect the U.S. Constitution while helping themselves to large portions of unconstitutional power and authority? How can they uphold the U.S. Constitution when they often don’t even consider the Constitution when rendering decisions? Or how can federal judges claim to fulfill their sworn duty when the majority of federal judges have endeavored to replace the U.S. Constitution with a different judicial standard?
The separation of power among the three branches of our government—executive, judicial, and legislative—was designed to safeguard our nation from the very thing we now face: a runaway branch of the government. But make no mistake. The check system is still in place. It just isn’t being used by Congress. Instead, our elected representatives go on allowing judges to enforce their new standard for law.
And exactly what is this new standard?
Footnote:
1 Benjamin Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), 10.
2 Benjamin Cardozo, The Growth of the Law (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1924), 49.
3 Final Report of the Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress, December 1993.
4 Lino A. Graglia, “Judicial Review on the Basis of ‘Regime Principles’: A Prescription for Government by Judges,” South Texas Law Journal, vol. 26, no. 3 (Fall 1985), 435–52, at 446.
