The Rule of Law

To subvert a well-established political system one must find a way to cannibalize and take over legitimate institutions and twist them toward radical ends – academia is obviously a case in point. But the fundamental safeguards of the United States is the Constitution and it’s role in the functioning of checks and balances. That is to say, that no one part of the system could override another part of the system – and the federal government was in turn checked by the states. The least important of these entities was the judiciary. Indeed, it was set forth in the Constitution as something to be established by Congress – rather than actually being established by the Constitution itself.

The rule of law applies to those involved in the legal system. In other words, that Judges will honestly follow the law as set forth before the public at large. The rule of law does not exist simply because judges make legal decisions.  If it did, the rule of law would be equally valid to judicial decisions made in Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Today, left-wing ideology is using the rule of law to force onto the country what it cannot achieve under the actual political system.

In contra to what we are told today – as courts chip away daily on our individual autonomy and freedom – statesman did not always cowardly defer to judicial overreach. President Jackson’s much noted comment was “Justice Marshal has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”  More substantively, no less a leader than Abraham Lincoln (in his first inaugural address), flat out reminded all that the Supreme Court did not run the country – and that he would not be bound by it.

President Lincoln stated:

I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government…At the same time, 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 in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.

That is precisely correct and precisely what has come to pass.

copyright 2018 J. Barnes