Neil Gorsuch has now been confirmed as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court over Sen. Chuck Schumer's bizarre objection that Judge Gorsuch was not a "mainstream" nominee.
The New York Democrat's complaint is that some of the judge's prior decisions "suggest a pattern of favoring corporate interests." Sen. Schumer, like Presidents Obama, wants judges who would "put themselves in the shoes of minorities, and the powerless of society."
As Stephen B. Press recently wrote in the Chicago Tribune, "Prior to the ... nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, there was a broad consensus that the job of judges was simply to follow the rules laid down and, if those rules were unjust, legal or constitutional change was thought better to come from the legislature or through constitutional amendments.
"Our proudest boast, as Americans, has always been that, ours is a government of laws and not men ... No one is above the law, not even judges."
The Founding Fathers intended that the Constitution they had just created vested all legislative power in Congress. If all legislative power is vested in Congress, then no legislative power is vested in judges.
The Founders vested judges with only judicial power. They never dreamed judges would dare to rewrite laws passed by the legislature, much less the Constitution -- to empower the poor, minorities, or anyone else.
What Sen. Schumer and President Obama are really asking for, are judges who say we don't care that our oath requires us to support "this Constitution" as Madison, Franklin and Hamilton meant it to be understood when they wrote it; we want judges who will construe it in a "more enlightened way" -- as we ourselves would construe it.
To argue that a judge who construes the Constitution consistently with the intent of Madison, Franklin and Hamilton is not in the mainstream, is bizarre.
Indeed worse, dishonest.
All federal and state judges take an oath to the Constitution as written by the Founders. There is, of course, an amendment process provided, but it does not include amendment by judges -- even Supreme Court Judges -- on a case by case basis. On the contrary, judges swear to construe this Constitution to insure that it is applied consistently with the spirit as intended by the Founders. That would not include hundreds of federal judges each construing it as they personally would have intended it to have been written.
Our Constitution is nothing more than a four-page document of approximately 7,500 words. Americans are ethnically, religiously and economically diverse. It is only in adherence to these words as understood by the Founders that Americans are and can be united. These 7,500 words are our common heritage.
When one group of judges construes those words consistently with the intent of the Founders, while hundreds of others construe them in ways they deem "more enlightened" to champion the cause of this or that minority, religious or economic group, we forswear our common heritage. When those 7,500 words take on sundry divergent constructions, we face the prospect of America breaking apart along partisan lines.
The right of a king to rule by decree, guarantees arbitrary rule and despotism. The right of judges to implement by decree their more enlightened notions is no less odious, and antithetical to democracy.
Our Constitution and Bill of Rights were meant to put our rights and liberties above the will of temporary legislative and judicial majorities.
Your rights and my rights, if construed as the founders intended, guarantee us, as against government, the same rights our fathers and grandfathers knew. If judges are free to redefine the extent of our rights, to the limits they deem more enlightened, we no longer have rule by law but rather rule by unelected despots in black robes.
Don't be misled. It is partisans like Sen. Schumer -- who want judges to favor elements of the political base -- who are not in the mainstream.
America needs judges who will faithfully construe our Constitution and laws as intended by the men who made them, and not rewrite them to benefit anybody's political base.
Posted: QCOline.com April 13, 2017
Copyright 2017, John Donald O'Shea
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