The basic two questions regarding any system of government are:
- Who has the ultimate power to control the nation?
- How will such persons be selected?
When the United States was founded, our Founders answered these questions in an unprecedented way. The supreme authority would not be any one person (one King rule) nor any group of persons (Oligarical Rule). But the highest authority would be a written document of law called the Constitution. The Constitution could only be changed with great difficulty and all officials and all laws were subject to it. Only 27 amendments have been added, the last in 1992, and ten of these were in the original “Bill of Rights.”
Moreover, the Constitution also guaranteed that no branch of government or group would violate the Constitution and rule at will. Thus the principle of “separation of powers” and the system of “checks and balances” were set forth in the Constitution to prevent this from happening. The Congress only made laws. The President only executed the laws. The Supreme Court only judged the validity of the laws according to the Constitution. For 150 years this system provided by the Constitution worked quite well during which time the USA became the freeiest, most progressive, and most powerful nation in the history of the world. The Congress made laws but did not judge or execute the laws they passed. The President executed the law, but did not make or judge t hem. The Supreme Court decided cases according to the laws that had been passed by Congress, executed by the president and according to the Constitution. The court did not legislate from the bench!
However, some 60 years ago the Supreme Court discovered a way it could have unlimited power. Permit me to explain. Judges on the Supreme Court are called “Justices” rather than simply “Judges.”
“If a case came to the Supreme Court and the Constitution did not say something that the Supreme Court justices wanted it to say, or thought it should say, they could claim to “discover” new principles in the Constitution, and no one would have power to overrule them. Whenever they thought it was important, they could simply create a new law and call it an “interpretation” of some part of the Constitution, and suddenly it becomes the highest law of the land! In this way the Supreme Court justices discovered that they could become the most powerful rulers in the entire country.”[1]
“One example of this happened on January 22, 1973, when the Supreme Court announced its decision regarding abortion in the case of Roe vs. Wade. This decision overturned the laws that restricted or prohibited abortion in all 50 states. The decision gave women an unrestricted right to abortion up to the point of “viability” (the point at which the newborn could live outside the womb, about twenty-eight weeks), but allowed for abortion to protect a women’s “health” even after that point. Since “health” was not defined broadly enough to include mental health and well-being, the actual result of the decision was to permit an unrestricted right to abortion throughout the entire forty weeks of pregnancy.
The decision was a 7-2 majority. But how could the justices claim that the Constitution guaranteed a woman a right to abortion when the Constitution said nothing at all about abortion? And how could they discover this new meaning specifically in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution when laws restricting or prohibiting abortion had been in existence in thirty-six states and territories at the very time that the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted?
The justices claimed that they found this right to abortion contained in a “right to privacy” that they saw in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, particularly in the “due process” provision of that amendment. That due process clause says this:
Nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
Where is a “right to privacy” contained in those words? It is simply not there. The Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified in 1868, and its primary purpose was to guarantee that slaves and their descendants would have all the rights of citizenship and equal protection to all other citizens under the law.
But where does the Fourteenth Amendment say anything or imply anything about abortion? It does not.”[2]
“The Fourteenth Amendment was never intended to have anything to do with abortion.
But by a 7-2 majority the Supreme Court found that the right to abortion was contained in the Fourteenth Amendment! And because the Supreme Court said so, it became the law of the land and has remained so since that day. There was nothing anyone in the nation could do about it.”[3]
“In a strongly worded dissent, Justice Byron White wrote as follows:
I find nothing in the language or history of the Constitution to support the Court’s judgment. The Court simply fashions and announces a new constitutional right for pregnant mothers and, with scarcely any reason or authority for its action, invests that right with sufficient substance to override most existing state abortion statutes…As an exercise of raw judicial power, the Court perhaps has authority to do what it does today; but , in my view, its judgment is an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”[4]
“As the Supreme Court issued more and more decisions of this nature – decisions not grounded in any law that had been passed by any Congress or any state legislature, and that were not part of what the Constitution originally meant – it became, in actual functioning, the highest governing authority in the nation. The justices discovered that they had the freedom to make up new constitutional doctrines whenever they could get a majority of five persons to do so, and they could always claim to “discover” the new doctrine in some vague principle of the Constitution or another.
This has happened so often in the last several decades that many people in the United States simply assume this is what should happen, that this is the kind of government we are supposed to have as a nation. But in fact it is far different from the government as originally established.”[5]
“This new power of the Supreme Court has not merely affected the question of whether a woman has the right to get an abortion. It has affected hundreds of other issues, which is why the decisions announced by the Supreme Court are so important in the direction of the nation. The Roe v. Wade decision was one of the most blatant exercises of “raw judicial power,’ but it was just an example of a policy that has been followed by the courts and Supreme Court in many other areas.”[6]
“No matter what one thinks about these individual issues, the important point is the process by which they were decided. None of these restrictions had first been passed by state or local representatives who are accountable to the people whom they serve. The decision about whether an opening prayer should be allowed in a graduation ceremony or a football game, or whether a copy of the Ten Commandments or some other moral quote should be posted in the hallways of a school, should be made by officials of the local school district, who are most accountable to the citizens of that community.
Asking a Roman Catholic priest or a Jewish rabbi to give an opening prayer at a football game is a far cry form “establishing” Roman Catholicism or Judaism as the official religion in the country. These two things bear no significant similarity to each other. In fact, allowing a diversity of religious opinions to be expressed actually protects freedom of religion for everyone. Allowing such diversity of expression in such settings (as was the custom in the United States prior to these restrictions by the Supreme Court decisions) enhances freedom of religion and does not suppress it. It shows that many different religions are allowed and protected in America. In addition, the restrictions on religious expression that the Supreme Court has imposed simply go contrary to the original intention of the First Amendment when it said that Congress could make no law “prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” that is, prohibiting the free exercise of religion. But now the “free exercise of religion” is severely restricted in public places.
The exclusion of statements about religion from the public square also means that schools are now prohibited from teaching the most fundamental fact in the universe, namely, that God created it. And they are prevented from teaching that God created human beings. They are prevented from teaching that God exists, though that belief is held by more than 90% of the people in the nation. But the views of that overwhelming majority do not matter to the members of the Supreme Court, for it has issued its decrees and has excluded this viewpoint from public schools – all on the basis of a theory of “separation of church and state” that was no part of the meaning of the First Amendment when it was adopted.
Moreover, even if 90 or 100% of the people in a local school district believe that children should be taught the moral values in the Ten Commandments, that viewpoint means nothing to the Supreme Court, for it has ruled that such teaching must be excluded from public schools (other than as a matter of historical interest that certain people believed these things at a certain time in history). No longer are parents or citizens allowed to decide what teaching about divine moral standards is best for their children, for that decision has been made for them by the Supreme Court.”[7]
“The makeup of the Supreme Court in 2010 is almost evenly balanced between liberal “activist” justices and conservative “originalist” justices, according to the following division:
Usually Liberal:
Stephen Breyer (born 1938; serving 1994 -) (appointed by President Clinton)
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (born 1933; serving 1993 -) (appointed by President Clinton)
Sonia Sotomayor (born 1954; serving 2009) (appointed by President Obama)
Elena Kagan (born 1960; serving 2010) (appointed by President Obama)
“Swing” vote, often siding with “originalist” justices:
Anthony Kennedy (born 1936; serving 1988) (appointed by President Reagan)
Consistently ruling according to the original meaning of the Constitution:
Samuel Alito (born 1950; serving 2006) (appointed by President George W. Bush).
John Roberts (born 1955; serving 2005) (appointed by President George W. Bush).
Antonio Scalia (born 1936; serving 1986) (appointed by President Reagan).
Clarence Thomas (born 1948; serving 1991) ( appointed by President George W. Bush).
This situation cannot last forever. Five of the current nine justices (as I write this) are at least seventy years old. Whenever one retires or dies, the current President nominates a replacement, and that person must be confirmed by the US Senate.
This is why the election every four years of a President, and the elections of US Senators, are going to decide the direction of the Supreme Court and the direction that the nation will take in this most crucial issue.
If the four liberal justices were to be replaced by four more “originalist” justices, then they would consistently send cases back to the Congress and back to the individual states for the elected representatives of the people to decide the important issues facing the nation. The United States would again become a functioning democracy rather than a nation ruled by unelected judges. The United States would once again function in the way that its founders intended, and the system of checks and balances between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government would be restored.”[8]
“The one practical way that individual Christians can influence this issue is by voting. Every Christian citizen who votes helps one side or the other on this issue in every election.
Unfortunately, the two political parties in the United States have now adopted completely opposite approaches to this issue, with Democrats supporting liberal, activists judges who will use the courts to advance a liberal agenda, and (most, but not all) Republicans supporting “originalist” judges and justices who will rule according to the original meaning of the Constitution. Therefore, every vote for every candidate at the state and national level will tend to strengthen one party or the other and will tend to perpetuate either a liberal, activist system of judges or a conservative, originalist system of judges.”[9]
“I believe this is the most important issue facing the nation, for it will decide who will rule the nation. It will decide whether we will once again become a nation with a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” or whether we will forever be ruled by nine unelected, lifetime justices on the Supreme Court.”[10]
[1] Wayne Gruden, Politics According to the Bible, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 2010, p132.
[2] Ibid, p. 133
[3] Ibid, p. 133.
[4] Ibid. p. 134
[5] Ibid, p. 134
[6] Ibid. p. 136
[7] Ibid. p. 137
[8] Ibid, pp. 151-152.
[9] Ibid. p. 153
[10] Ibid. p. 154.