The U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 6-3 ruling this week that is yet another step in a disturbing trend. A Court majority ruled that it is "cruel and unusual punishment" under the 8th Amendment to imprison juveniles for life. www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/us/politics/18court.html?scp=3&sq=supreme+court&st=nyt Five of the justices cited as one source of authority for their decision a U.N. treaty that has not been ratified by the Senate. Chief Justice Roberts concurred with the result in this particular case, but not with extending the ruling to all juveniles. By so doing, the Court majority was clearly legislating and not ruling judicially on a case-by-case basis as the Constitution sets out the function of the Court.
An excellent article in Imprimis by a Michigan Supreme Court justice traces the trend of the Supreme Court in becoming an unelected super legislature and what this portends for the future.
www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp The core of the battle is between jurists who see the role of the Court as measuring specific cases against what the Constitution, as written, requires in a particular instance and those jurists who see the Constitution as a "living, breathing" document that they alone interpret and which gives rise to sweeping policy pronouncements like the case cited above. The tricky part is that both sides use the same words, but with very different meanings. Although this may seem esoteric and something that only lawyers would find interesting, it is a life or death subject for the future of democracy in this country.
I have previously written about the strong streak of authoritarianism that runs through liberalism. The reason is that when they enact their policies into law, as is happening now with a Democratic President and Congress, they remind voters anew how arrogant and anti-Democratic they really are and lose the next election - often by a huge margin. Thus, they need another way to keep foisting their statist agenda on the country and what better way than the courts, whose members are unelected, appointed for life and, when it comes to the Supreme Court, not subject to any review. The method used by the judges is the "living, breathing" method of "interpreting" the Constitution, which really means "It is what we say it is, so shut up and sit down!"
Elites always think they know better than the people at large. Thus, in Europe there are no juries but rather just magistrates to decide your fate and, by the way, you have the burden of establishing your innocence. The EU has a corps of bureaucrats in Belgium that decide every minute detail of peoples' lives and the citizens of the EU countries have no recourse if they disagree because the bureaucrats are unelected. The same is true in health care. You get what you get and if you don't like it, you can't get a second opinion unless your are wealthy enough to travel to the U.S. The Founders of the United States explicitly rejected this model and created a system of checks and balances on the three branches of government and reserved ultimate power for the people. The elites in the U.S. are rejecting our historic differences from Europe and trying to erase the grand experiment that is the United States. To do this, they will use elected politicians if possible who ignore the will of the people once in office or, if that doesn't work, by five unelected justices of the Supreme Court.
Take the time to read the Imprimis article. We still have the right to vote and we should use it to elect responsible politicians who will take care in approving appointments to the Federal courts (can you say Kagan?), e.g. - judges who will be faithful to the Constitution as written and not to their own idea of what should be.
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