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American Minute with Bill Federer
Judicial Activism: Why Justices should NOT Usurp Power & Make Laws
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Yale President Ezra Stiles stated in 1783:
"Most states of all ages ... have been founded in rapacity, usurpation and injustice ...
The Nimrods ... (were) the first invading tyrants of the ancient ages ... The spirit of conquest had changed the first governments ...
All succeeding ones have in general proved one continued series of injustice, which has reigned in all countries for almost 4,000 years."
Read as PDF ...
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The first invention was the plow. The Bible tells of Cain being a "tiller of the soil."
Then people started hitting each other with and they turned into weapons.
British philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan (1651), wrote of man in his primitive state:
"Every man is enemy to every man ... Men live without other security than what their own strength ... (There was) ... no culture ... no society ...
And worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death ... The life of man (was) solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."
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Insecurity for life and property caused people to gravitate together for protection.
When people who are threatened get together for mutual protection, one of them knows how to fight better than the rest, and everyone says, you be our captain to organize our defense.
The Book of Judges, chapter 10, gives an example of this:
"When the children of Ammon made war against Israel, the elders of Gilead went… unto Jephthah, 'Come, and be our captain, that we may fight with the children of Ammon.'"
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When a captain organizes people to fight and they win, everyone tends to show preference to the captain's family.
The Book of Judges, chapter 8, has the account:
"Then the men of Israel said unto Gideon, 'Rule thou over us, both thou, and thy son, and thy son's son also: for thou hast delivered us from the hand of Midian.'"
Over time, the sons and grandsons claim to be an elite family, a political machine, giving out favors to their supporters and ostracizing their opponents.
Inevitably, one family member begins to act as a political boss, a gang leader, a despot, ... a king.
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Even if a king concentrates power for the purpose of doing good more efficiently, after he dies, that power is passed on to his descendants who are tempted to use it oppressively.
The Book of Genesis, chapters 37-50, Joseph in Egypt helped concentrate power into the hands of the Pharaoh who used it for good, providing food for the children of Israel, giving them the best land of Goshen, and even employing them to care for his cattle.
But then there was a new Pharaoh "who did not know Joseph," and he used the concentrated power to oppress the children of Israel, making them throw their sons into the Nile River.
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Boasting of concentrated power, King James I told Parliament in 1609:
"Kings are not only God's lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God's throne, but even by God himself they are called gods ...
Kings are compared to the head ... of the body of man ...
It is sedition in subjects to dispute what a king may do in the height of his power ...
The king is overlord of the whole land, so is he master over every person that inhabiteth the same, having power over the life and death of every one of them ... so the power flows always from himself."
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France's Louis XIV, the "Sun King," reportedly stated:
"It is legal because I wish it";
and
"I am the State" ("L'État, c'est moi").
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Santa Anna declared himself Mexico's dictator-for-life and insisted he be addressed by the title "Most Serene Highness."
He wrote to U.S. minister to Mexico, Joel R. Poinsett:
"A hundred years to come my people will not be fit for liberty ... a despotism is the proper government for them."
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Webster's 1828 Dictionary defines:
"DESPOTISM:
1. Absolute power; authority unlimited and uncontrolled by men, constitution or laws, and depending alone on the will of the prince; as the despotism of a Turkish sultan.
2. An arbitrary government, as that of Turkey and Persia (Iran)."
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Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Jarvis, September 28, 1820:
"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 ..."
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Jefferson continued:
"Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so .... and 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 corruptions of time and party, its members would become DESPOTS."
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Thomas Jefferson wrote to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804:
"Nothing in the Constitution has given them (judges) a right to decide for the Executive, more than to the Executive to decide for them ...
The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional ... not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature and executive ... would make the judiciary a DESPOTIC BRANCH."
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On OCTOBER 15, 1788, James Madison warned:
"As the COURTS are generally the last in making the decision, it results to them, by refusing or not refusing to execute a law, to stamp it with its final character.
This makes the Judiciary department paramount in fact to the Legislature, which was NEVER intended and can NEVER be proper."
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On OCTOBER 15, 1991, the U.S. Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas as a Justice on the Supreme Court.
When questioned during the hearings by Senator Thurmond regarding judicial activism, Clarence Thomas replied:
"The role of a judge is a limited one. It is to ... interpret the Constitution, where called upon, but AT NO POINT to impose his or her will or ... opinion in that process."
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Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, 1835, warned:
"The President, who exercises a limited power, may err without causing great mischief in the State.
Congress may decide amiss without destroying the Union, because the electoral body in which Congress originates may cause it to retract its decision by changing its members.
But IF THE SUPREME COURT is ever composed of IMPRUDENT MEN or BAD CITIZENS, the Union may be plunged into ANARCHY or CIVIL WAR."
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The Union was plunged into a Civil War by Democrat appointed Justice Roger Taney, who gave the Supreme Court's infamous Dred Scott decision in 1857 that slaves were not citizens, but property.
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President Abraham Lincoln alluded to this decision in his First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861:
"I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court ...
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 ... THE PEOPLE will have CEASED to be THEIR OWN RULERS,
having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of the eminent tribunal."
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