Supreme Court's Hubris Will Be Its Undoing
By Michael Paranzino (03/07/05)
Judicial activism has run amok, with state and federal judges as well as Supreme Court Justices racing to invent new, expansive “rights” that have no basis in law. The latest chapter in this sorry saga came with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision last week in Roper v. Simmons, creating a Constitutional right for 17 year-olds to kill innocent people and escape the death penalty.
If you are wondering why you have never read that “right” in the Constitution, the answer is because it is not in there. Five unelected lawyers with life tenure on the Court invented it last week.
Fortunately, the Court’s increasingly naked hubris will ultimately be its undoing, as it will wake the “sleeping giant” known as the American people.
In this case, Justice Kennedy, writing for the Court’s five most liberal Justices, found that the 8th Amendment’s prohibition on “cruel and unusual punishments” prohibited the elected representatives of a state from giving juries the option to select a sentence of death for any killer who is 17 or 16 at the time of his killing(s), no matter how heinous or premeditated the crime.
I plead with you to read the majority opinion and Justice Scalia’s dissent, to grasp the true recklessness of the majority opinion. (You can read it here: http://scotus.ap.org/scotus/03-633p.zo.pdf) Of course, I cannot outdo Scalia’s dissection of it, but allow me to point out a few of the whoppers in the majority opinion.
The Court’s majority found a “national consensus” against executing 17 year-old killers, despite the fact that 40% of the states representing more than 40% of our country’s population permitted execution of 17 year-old killers at the moment the Court’s decision was issued. (Look up “consensus” if you are not laughing out loud right now.)
The Court also found that many prominent foreigners and foreign governments currently oppose American juries having the option to sentence a 17 year-old killer to death. What that has to do with the U.S. Constitution, the Court majority only mumbles about.
The Court majority concluded that regardless of whether there is a consensus on this issue among Americans, it is the Justices themselves who get to make the call for all 291 million Americans.
The Court argues that as “for deterrence, it is unclear whether the death penalty has a significant or even measurable deterrent effect on juveniles…,” even though the 17 year-old killer in this very case had a shrewd understanding of our pathetic juvenile justice system, having, in the Court’s words, “assured his friends they could ‘get away with it’ because they were minors.”
The Court even ignores, in arguing that 17 year-olds can’t control their actions, that more than 99% of 17 year-olds never kill anyone.
The point of this recitation is to demonstrate that the majority barely tries to hide what it is actually doing: openly and actively undermining the Constitution to further the Justices’ own preferences.
The majority appears to be laughing: Let Scalia eviscerate us, they must be saying, since we have the votes. And the text of the Constitution is seemingly powerless against five votes from the modern Supreme Court.
While this obviously has implications for the judicial confirmation process, it goes much deeper than that. As long as Americans simply acquiesce in the near-weekly power-grabs from the unelected millionaire lawyers who dominate the Court, the Justices will only grow more bold in rewriting the Constitution to suit their liberal policies, which are routinely rejected at the ballot box. After all, with just 11% of Americans identifying themselves as liberals, the extreme Left knows they can never win in a democracy.
But they know they can undermine democracy with just 5 votes on the Court.
It is far past time for Americans to begin to respond to this threat. The battle will take not years but decades, and will require everything from Constitutional amendments to ending free European junkets for Supreme Court Justices.
The nonprofit I run just launched a new website, www.JudgesGoneWild.com, to lead this reform campaign. It won’t be easy to rein in a judiciary so thirsty for absolute power, but it’s time for all Americans to get involved to restore their democratic rights, and to restore the Unites States as a nation of laws, not a nation ruled by 5 lawyers.
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