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By
Jon Christian Ryter
Copyright 2002 - All Rights Reserved
To distribute this article, please post this web address or hyperlink
Disgusted
that the Democratically-controlled Senate was dragging its heels on giving
U.S. District Court Judge D. Brooks Smith a confirmation hearing after
he was nominated to fill a vacancy on the 3rd Circuit Appeals Court by
President George W. Bush, Senator vRick
Santorum [R-PA] mockingly compared the Democratic foot-dragging by playing
on a catch phrase used by the communist-hunting Wisconsin senator Joe
McCarthy in the mid-1950s: Are you now or have you ever been a conservative
or a member of a conservative organization?
Thus far only seven George W. Bush judicial
nominees have been confirmed by the Senate Judiciary Committee which is
now headed by Senator Patrick J. Leahy. With reference to Judge Smith,
Delaware liberal Democrat Joseph Biden who did his best to kill the nomination
of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas in July, 1991, vowed
to kill Smiths nomination if ...he was not completely forthcoming...
in answering all of the questions poised to him by Senate Democrats, told
the Washington Times that he was ...maintaining an open mind inregards
to Judge Smiths confirmation. On February 26 Biden told Smith
I will do everything in my power to defeat you, including moving
to the Senate floor to take action Ive never taken in my life as
a United States Senatora filibuster. Smiths crime? As
Santorum said, he is a conservative who believes that the United States
is governed by the rule of law, and that the Constitution of the United
States is the foundation of law in America.
In the 16 months since his inauguration,
Bush has nominated 65 judicial candidates to fill 128 vacancies on the
federal bench. Only 28 have been confirmed. Twenty-nine of Bushs
nominations were to fill federal circuit court vacancies. Six of them
have been confirmed. Two of the six were actually Clinton nominees who
Bush renominated as a gesture of good will to the Democrats to show he
wanted a diverse, bipartisan administration. Out of the 862 Article III
federal court benches, there are 100 vacanciesabout 20% of the federal
judgeships. Half of the seats in the 6th Circuit are vacant. Thirty-nine
of the vacancies as judicial emergency vacancies.
During his first two years in office, Bill Clinton nominated 22 circuit
court judges. Nineteen of them were confirmed. George H.W. Bush nominated
23 with 22 confirmations.
Reagan nominated 20 with 19 confirmations. During the latter two years
of Clintons administration, when the political ideologies of his
appointees became so extremeand therefore less qualified to sit
on the federal bench, the GOP controlled Senate deferred voting on several
of them, asking Clinton to resubmit candidates who could be approved.
Senator Patrick Leahy addressed the Senate Judiciary Committee on September
30, 1997 and said: Those who delay or prevent the filling of these
vacancies must understand that they are delaying or preventing the administration
of justice. Further, the Democratic minority declared that ...instead
of cobbling together even more obstacles, Senators should do the work
they are sworn and paid to do and fill these vacancies. Todays
Democratic rhetoric is based on revenge. They insist they chose to delay
Bushs nominees simply because
the GOP-controlled Senate left several judgeships vacant believing that
Bush appointees would be more to their liking than the liberal Clinton
appointees. Further, they very bluntly justify their actions by insisting
that the Bush appointees are too far right and, therefore,
are not acceptable to a majority of the American people who, they feel,
are as left of center as they. Ignored in their analysis are the views
of the American people whom Congress has ignored for too long. When the
Senate began dragging their heels in confirming Bushs judicial appointments
last spring, a national survey was taken in May, 2001 in which the respondents
were asked what standards should be applied by President Bush
in selecting judges he intended to nominate for the federal bench.
By a 2-to-1 margin the American people replied
that they believed that President Bushs promise to appoint judges
who would strictly interpret the Constitution ...and will not use
the bench to write social policy... is the ...proper standard
for appointing judges. And by a majority of 48% to 36% Americans
opposed the tactics applied by Senate Democrats who were attempting to
block Bushs political appointments based entirely on their political
ideology because that ideology is based on the concepts of the rule of
law rather than achieving social justice for minorities at
the expense of the majority through judicial activism. (And, today it
is important to realize that the minorities who are seeking
enfranchisement are not African Americans. They are ideological
minoritieshomosexuals, lesbians, atheists and radical feminists
who are determined to completely destroy the precepts of family values
in America by eliminating Christianity as the bedrock faith of America.
More
now than ever before in the history of the United States the liberals
are determined to stop the influx of Constitutionally-conservative judges
to the bench because very likely within the next decade the new confirmable
nominees for the United States Supreme Court will come from the ranks
of US District Court and Circuit Court judges. When the Supreme Court
was forced to weigh in on the 2000 Electionand based entirely on
the rule of lawweighed in favor of Texas Governor George
W. Bush, outrage echoed through the largely left-wing law schools of America.
According to Roger Pilon in an Insight on
the News interview, ...In January some 550 professors from 120 [law]
schools ran a full page ad in the New York Times decrying the high courts
majority for having acted not as judges but as political proponents
for candidate Bush. It goes without saying that had the Justices
ruled in favor of Gore, the decision would have not only been acceptable
to them, it would have been appropriate since, in their view, Gore had
won a popular vote victory. (My latest book, DESTINY DENIED, which should
be off press shortly will reveal precisely how Mr. Gore achieved that
popular victory. It did not come from winning properly cast
legal ballots.
In fact, the book will show that Gores popular vote victory resulted
from illegal manipulation of the electoral system in several different
ways that should have resulted in investigations of several key Gore campaign
officials and perhaps hundreds of Democratic officials at both State and
County levels all across the country.)
The liberals, using Ralph Neas, president
of the People For the American Way (whose agenda is anything but American)
as their unofficial spinmeister, do not see what Senator Santorum called
a Republican witch hunt. Senator Leahy justified the Democratic
foot-dragging by saying that ...Republicans
held up 167 judicial nominations by the end of the Clinton Administration.
In analyzing Leahys comment, Paul Weyrichs Free Congress Foundation
noted that ...if held up means means kept 167 Clinton
nominees from being confirmed, that claim is false. A Congressional Research
Service [CRS] report shows that the Senate confirmed 173 of 230 judicial
nominations it received during the 104th and 105th Congress...The Senate
confirmed 72 of 117 nominations it received during the 106th Congress.
The Republican-led Senate left 102 Clinton nominees unconfirmed.
Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle justified the foot-dragging by saying
that ...Over 45% of all circuit court judge nominees never got to
see the light of day in the last five years. [None] were given a hearing,
[none were] vetted, heard [or] voted on.
Daschles words were a misstatement
of fact. Daschle, like most good liberals, can pull magic numbers
from the sky whenever they are needed. In point of fact, 61% of all of
Clintons judicial nominees were approved. Thirty-nine percent, after
hearings, were not approved. Most of those nominated received their day
in court. One hundred nominees remained unapproved in part because
of the final days rush on the part of Bill Clinton to nominate
liberals for every own bench seat. (Arizona Democratic Senator Henry Reid
claimed that 55% of Clintons nominees never saw the light of day.
He should have compared notes with Daschle. While both were wrong, having
the same numbers would have bolstered the arguments of each.)
Most of the unconfirmed Clinton judicial
nominees were opposed by the State, county and municipal police agenciesand
the State and County prosecuting attorneysof their own States as
being far too liberal in their views on law and order.
When the police and the prosecutors tell
the Senate that these judicial nominees are soft on crime
those judges become part of the problem and not the solution.
Ralph Neas, president of Norman Lears
far left advocacy group People For the American
Way, who led the fight to kill Pickerings nomination is now leading
the fight against Smith. Neas insists that the ideology of federal judiciary
nominees matters now more than ever before.
Neas, the pitbull being used by Leahy to
convince the American people that George W. Bush is attempting to pack
the federal judiciary with right-wing candidates who would have the power
to reverse the civil rights advancements of the last decade,
or decide whether women will continue to have the right to kill their
unborn children under the guise of reproductive choice. Neas
opined that the liberals must question the nominees ideologiesadding
by that he did not mean the political beliefs of the nominee, but their
judicial views. Clearly that was not the case when the Senate Judiciary
Committee refused to even consider Judge Pickering whose judicial decisions
are centrist. Pickering should have been an easy confirmation.
Defending the Smith nomination in early
April, Santorum declared that Leahy is ...on a witch hunt.
Leahy denied Santorums allegations, saying that We are moving
forward as quickly as we can, and I will continue to do that. No matter
what is said on the other side, Leahy added, no matter how
much things are taken out of context, no matter how much friction we hear
on the floor from that side, I will move them forward. Forward to
whatoblivion?
Santorum was right.
Joe Biden confirmed that when he told Smith that he would do everything
in his power, including a filibuster, to make sure that Smith was not
approved.
Clearly, revenge plays a small role in the
ideology witch hunt now taking place in the US Senate, but protecting
the political agenda that is wrought by judicial activism is much more
important. The left-wing of the Democratic Party knows that the agenda
they are fabricating through the federal courts could never be successfully
legislated and signed into law even by a liberal president posing as a
moderate New Democrat. That is why Hillary Clintons
Health Security Act of 1994 failed to pass in a Democratically-controlled
House and Senate. Those on the Hill want to get re-elected.
If, on the other hand, laws are left vague
enough, they will end up in a federal court room where the magistrate
has the latitude to interpret what Congress meant when they
wrote the law. Liberal judges use judicial activism to judicially legislate
the societal agenda of the left-wing with impunity since they are appointed
to lifetime positions. They have no fear of being thrown out of office
during the next election. Conservative judges, on the other hand, are
generally not political activists, and therefore are more inclined to
apply the existing constitutional rule of law in rendering their decisions.
That does not bode well for liberals who need judicial activism to promulgate
their left-wing agenda that cannot be legislated.
Neas, in his attacks on Pickering and Smith
insist that the personal political pedigrees of judicial nominees have
always been questioned and that Presidents have always appointed nominees
based entirely on whether that nominee would promulgate the Partys
political ideology. To prove his argument, Neas cited the failure
of George Washington to get his first Chief Justice nominee cleared by
the Senate in 1795, noting that approximately 20% of John Adams
high court nominees were rejected. It should be noted that Adams attempted
to convert the office of President to the role of pseudo-monarch and attempted
to legislate laws that made it a criminal offense to speak out against
the President. Adams was repudiated by the States with the publications
of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolves that denounced Adams sedition
acts and ended Adams political career.
Judicial
Activism
Prior to the election of the Jacobin stooge,
Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, federal judgesparticularly US Supreme Court
judgeswere selected based on one of two criteria. First, judges
who were considered for appointment to the high court were judged
on their knowledge of constitutional law and whether or not decisions
they rendered were upheld or overturned by higher courts. Second, the
spoils system came into being during Grants administration when
Credit Mobilier of America and Standard Oil began the rampant buying of
Congressmen and Senators, and wealthy contributors were paid off with
plum civil service jobs, the most sought after being federal judgeships
since they were lifetime appointments. Cronyism not political ideology
was the yardstick by
which these candidates were measured. When they failed to secure confirmation
it was not because they were ideologically-opposed to the Party which
controlled the Senate (since the GOP controlled both Houses of Congress
and the White House from 1861 to 1877), it was because the nominees were
completely lacking in qualifications.
Most federal judgeships during that era
were political payoffs to party loyalists. The same is true of the Supreme
Court. Supreme Court justices were largely powerful former Senators or
Congressmen who used their political clout to secure lifetime berths to
protect legislation they created.
When New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt
was elected to the presidency on a pledge to create a new deal
for the working man in 1932, he immediately embarked on the titanic task
of creating a blatantly unconstitutional agenda that would ultimately
strip both the Judicial and Legislative branches of government of much
of their authority as he created an unconstitutional fourth branch of
governmentthe bureaucracyto manage the behemoth monster he
was creating to funnel all of the powers of governance into the hands
of the Executive Branchor more specifically, into the hands of Franklin
D. Roosevelt.
As Roosevelts New Deal Congress rubber-stamped
legislation (largely written by FDR brain-truster Raymond Moley and his
team of socialist lawyers, American Civil Liberties co-founder Felix Frankfurter,
a close Roosevelt advisor, and New Deal Senator Hugo Black who pushed
FDRs bills through Congress, getting Congressmen and Senators to
cast their votes on bills without ever reading them) the Supreme Court
found itself flooded with challenges to the New Deal laws. In many cases,
in order to get the cases before the high court, companies affected by
Roosevelts unconstitutional regulations sued themselves.
The third New Deal law, enacted on May 12,
1933 (the Agricultural Adjustment Act) was the first New Deal law to be
declared unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court. It would not be the
last. Buried within this law was a clause (that Congress, which would
have had to have read the proffered legislation to know the clause existed)
that transferred the authority to coin money from Congress
to the President, and another clause that gave the Federal Reserve dictatorial
control over the expansion or contraction of consumer credit (which gave
the Fed even more control over creating recessions on whim). What brought
that legislation before the high court was not the fact that Roosevelt
had usurped the separation of powers with respect to coining money, but
rather because Roosevelt attempted to nationalize farming
by controlling farm production and the pricing of agricultural products
in the United States.
Congress, which today cannot distinguish
between constitutional and unconstitutional laws,
developed that penchant in the early 1930s simply because it was expedient
to do so. The fact that the laws they were enacting violated the Constitution
meant nothing to them since they believed the national emergency
deliberately created by the Federal Reserve and promulgated by Roosevelt
mandated extreme, even if illegal, measures to address real problems that
affected real people. Once the precedent for legislating laws that skirted
constitutionality was codified, the courts began to view them as legal.
In the case of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933, which appeared
before the court in the form of United States v. Butler, et al., Receivers
of Hoosac Mills Corporation. The Supreme Court, in voiding the law, stated
that the law infringed on rights reserved exclusively for the States.
Next to fall was the National Industrial Recovery Act, which was originally
passed on May 17, 1933. Next to fall was the Railway Pension Act of 1934.
Suddenly the floodgates opened and, one by one, almost every piece of
legislation dealing with the New Deal was declared unconstitutional by
the Hughes Court because Roosevelt violated the separation of powers as
he attempted to take dictatorial control of government.
FDR was not a happy camper. One-by-one,
nine old men were dismantling the New Deal almost as fast as Congress
legislated it. Congress, voting the whim of the Democratically leadership
that was taking its marching orders from the White House, could not seem
to get it through their heads that the US Supreme Court was not going
to allow Roosevelt to create laws that ignored the constitutional separation
between the States and the central government, or between the Executive,
Legislative and Judicial branches of government since each New Deal law
allowed the unconstitutional fourth branch of government, the bureaucracy,
to establish the regulations by which the laws would be managed. The bureaucracy,
in writing the regulations, were actually legislating laws. Then, without
a vote by the peoples representatives, the regulations were posted
in the Federal Register. If the regulations were not contested by Congress
within 90 days, the regulations became codifiedthey became as much
a part of the law as that which was legislated by constitutional procedures.
The bureaucracy also granted itself judicial power to find
violators guilty and assess penalties in the form of fines or imprisonmentor
bothwithout trials...functions that belong exclusively to the Judicial
Branch of government.
Slowly,
Roosevelt got the message.
Not even his fabricated national emergency
would allow him to arbitrarily expand his authority beyond that provided
by the Constitution. In fact, the Supreme Court was getting tired of Roosevelts
trite harping on a national emergency that no longer existed after FDR
stopped the gold drain by illegally outlawing the private ownership of
gold by American citizens.
Homer Cummings, FDRs attorney general,
who was advised by a minor Roosevelt aide named Samuel Rosen that most
of the New Deal defeats came from one vote losses in the high court, suggested
to Roosevelt that he seek legislation to appoint two or three more Supreme
Court justices, taking the nine member court to twelve. Roosevelt decided
to expand the court even more to protect his New Deal agenda.
On February 4, 1937 Roosevelt summoned Senate
Majority Leader Joe Robinson, House
Speaker John Bankhead, and Judiciary Chairmen Hatton Sumners from the
House and Henry Ashurst from the Senate to let them know he had just sent
a bill to Congress that would allow him to appoint a new Associate Justice
for each Justice over the age of 70 who refused to resign from the court.
The new legislation would allow him to add up to six new Justices. While
each of the Congressmen and Senators were shocked that Roosevelt
believed he could stack the court with those ideologically-tied to the
New Deal, Hatton Sumners believed his ship had come in. Roosevelt would
owe him big time when he delivered the legislation to the
White House.
Sumners aside, the mainstream liberals in
Congress who were most closely aligned with FDR were angered when they
realized that Roosevelt was attempting to politicize the Supreme Court.
If he succeeded, the leadership in the House and Senate knew that an unbiased
Supreme Court would no longer exist. Federal judges at all levels would
be appointed based not on their judicial qualifications but their political
ideologies and party pedigrees.
The task of killing Roosevelts court-stacking
plan fell on two of Roosevelts closest liberal allies in the Senate:
Burton K. Wheeler and Carter Glass. On the House side, Sumners and Bankhead
were prepared to push the legislation through the House even though they
knew it would politicize the Supreme Court.
Once Wheeler and Glass leaked word of what FDR was attempting to the media,
Congress and the White House was flooded with 50,000 angry telegrams within
24 hours. Although Sumner had the votes to push Roosevelts court-stacking
plan onto the floor of the House for a vote, where it would likely die,
Sumners and Bankhead got cold feet and buried the bill. If the Senate
passed it, Sumners decided, he would resurrect the bill and force it through
the House. Glass and Wheeler, however, were very effective in painting
Roosevelts plan for what it wasan attempt on the part of the
White House to add up to six new ideologically-linked associate justices
on the high court who would rubber
stamp the unconstitutional New Deal legislation. The expansion bill died
a bitter death. Instead of blaming Samuel Rosen who actually dreamed up
the idea, FDR fired his Attorney General, Homer Cummings who had eagerly
claimed credit for the plan, replacing him with New Dealer Michigan governor
Frank Murphy.
With his court-stacking plan dead, Roosevelt
tried to initiate a bill that would force every Justice over the age of
70 to retire. This would have obligated three of the justices to step
down. Two of the post-70 justices confided to Sumners that the only thing
stopping them from retiring at that moment was the fact that their pensions
were half of their incomes and neither could afford the pay cut. Within
three months the Democratically-controlled Congress enacted legislation
that
increased the pensions of retiring Supreme Court justices. Associate Justices
Willis VanDevanter and George Sutherland announced their retirement. While
Roosevelt wanted to nominate Senator Hugo Black, who pushed most of FDRs
New Deal legislation through the Senate, and braintruster Felix Frankfurter
as his first picks for the high court, Roosevelt was certain that Glass
and Wheeler would sabotage Frankfurters nomination since the Vienna
born jurist wrote most of the New Deal legislation that Black rammed through
the Senate. In place of Frankfurter, whose position on the Supreme Court
would not be confirmed until 1939, Roosevelt named Stanley Reed, the Solicitor
General who had been defending the New Deal legislation before the high
court since 1935. In 1937 Black and Reed, the New Deal advocates, joined
the high court. When Frankfurter joined the court in 1939, the New Deal
bureaucracy would be successfully codified for all time. The United States
Supreme Court had been politicized. From that moment forward politics,
not constitutional qualifications, became the yardstick by which the Senate
measured the cloth of every candidate for the high court with the Party
that controlled the Senate determining what ideological pattern
would be acceptable for admission to the bench.
If
the nominees are eminently qualified for seats not only on the high court
but the appellate and district courts as wellas were both D. Brooke
Smith and George W. Pickeringthen a filibuster is used to keep the
nomination from being voted on in committee or brought to the full Senate
for a floor vote.
Probably the two best examples of the politicizing
of the United States Supreme was the 1939 addition of Frankfurter to the
high court and the 1985 denial of a seat to US District Court Judge Robert
Bork. Bork, who was nominated by Ronald Reagan, was recognized by friend
and foe alike as the leading constitutional authority in the United States.
His reputation was spotless. His judicial credentials were impeccable.
Not one of the more than 400 judicial decisions that Bork wrote or joined
into were ever reversed by a higher court. The flaw in his
character as far as the liberals were concerned was his private stand
on abortion and his view that the Constitution was not an evolving
document that was subject to reinterpretation by the high court.
In what proved to be the most controversial
Supreme Court nomination in US history (even more so than the Clarence
Thomas hearing), the Senate Judiciary hearing, chaired by Sen. Joe Biden
amassed a plethora of feminist activists who argued that Bork would single-handedly
overturn Roe v. Wade. On the streets of America, the AFL-CIO campaigned
against Bork as a fascist who would destroy the bedrock of democracy in
America since Bork did not believe the high court justices had the right
to reinterpret what the Constitution means in order to better
serve an evolving society through judicial activism. Bork,
the most qualified jurist of his day was denied a seat on the high court.
Conversely, Felix Frankfurters nomination
to the Supreme Court was rubber-stamped by the New Deal Congress in 1939
specifically to protect the utopian agenda of the Roosevelt Administration
from being short-circuited by the high court. Once Roosevelt managed to
politicize the high court, the Supreme Court went back and readdressed
several New Deal laws they had previously ruled as unconstitutionalsuddenly
deciding those laws just may have been within the scope of Congress to
enact after all. By legitimatizing the New Deal laws, the US Supreme Court
legalized an unelected bureaucracy that now rewrites the original intent
of the laws passed by Congress through rule making provisions that allow
bureaucrats to amend any law with regulations that can, and
sometimes does, change the original intent of the law.
Frankfurter, like Bork, was viewed by his
peers as a constitutional scholar. But he was an enigma in that he, like
Roosevelt, believed that the Constitution was an archaic and outmoded
document. The Vienna, Austria-born jurist believed the Constitution must
be construed as an evolving document that could be reinterpreted by the
Court to better
serve the needs of an evolving societyor better stated, to fit the
evolving needs of the central government attempting to usurp the supra-authority
of the States.
Although the practice of legislating from
the bench is expressly forbidden to the federal courts by the Constitution,
Frankfurter and the associate justices who followed him like Harry Blackmun
who saw somewhere in the Constitution a womans right
to slaughter her unborn child and wrote the majority opinion in Roe v.
Wade, Doe v. Bolton which declared that a woman has such an inherent right
to privacy that she can kill the baby within her womb for intruding on
that right. Frankfurter declared that he found that right
in the 14th Amendment, but that it may well be construed in the 8th and
9th Amendments as well. Clearly, constitutional scholars have been searching
for a home amendment for the right to murder, but thus far
none have found it. Roe v. Wade is now referred to as the wandering
Jew of constitutional law since it has no home amendment to which
it can be tethered.
Blackmun
later admitted that the right to kill the unborn did not exist
until the Supreme Court said it did. What is interesting in that three
decade old ruling is that, on one hand, the Supreme Court ruled (and continues
to uphold) the right of a woman to rid her body of an unwanted fetus (based
on an assumption that a fetus is not a human being), while on the other,
the lower federal courts continue to rule that the unborn are human beings
who are entitled to the protection of the courts.
While most Americans are not aware of it,
Frankfurter was the architect of most of Roosevelts New Deal laws.
Hugo Black hammered them through the Senate, and then Solicitor General
Stanley Reed (Roosevelts third pick for the Supreme Court) fought
in the courts to have the New Deal declared constitutional. Frankfurter,
who understood the utopian agenda behind the New Deal better than anyone
else, joined the high court in 1939. Frankfurter would protect the New
Deal until he retired from the high court in 1962. Frankfurter, using
the precedent created by John Marshall (but invalidated by the ratification
of the 11th Amendment) claimed that the commerce clause was
an actual enumerated right of the federal government rather than simply
a declaratory preamble which merely specified that it was the responsibility
of the central government to provide for the general welfare of
the people of the United States and promote commerce through the specific
enumerated rights delineated in the Constitution. To make certain the
central government understood that their authority over the States and
over the people was limited to a very narrow spectrum, the 10th Amendment
stipulated the rights not specifically ascribed to the central government
were reserved exclusively for the States and the people.
Frankfurter, a Marxist who believed that government was, or should be,
omnipotent, brought that government knows best philosophy
to the high courtan ideology shared by Roosevelt who filled most
of his key departmental slots with like-minded socialists.
From 1973 forward all Supreme Court nominees
have been selectedor rejectedbased on their political pedigrees
or, at least, their perceived political or societal ideologies. When George
H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace African-American Associate
Justice Thurgood Marshall who announced his retirement on
June 27, 1991, the liberalsand the black community as an entitydid
everything they could to sabotage the nomination. When the far left demanded
that Bush appoint a black jurist to replace Marshall, they apparently
did not think Bush could find a qualified conservative African-American.
When Thomas conservative bonafides were published in the mainstream
(liberal) media, the outcry began. When the Senate confirmation hearings
began in September, liberals dug up a former aide of Thomas, Anita
Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma who leveled allegations
of sexual harassment against the jurist.
Hill maintained that when she worked for
Thomas when he headed the Equal Opportunities Commission he had inappropriate
discussions with her about sex, sex acts and pornographic moviesafter
he declined his invitation to date him.
In reality, Thomas was ideologically too
far to the right to suit civil rights activists. Most African-American
civil rights advocacy groups openly opposed him strictly because of his
conservative views, including his stance against affirmative action programs.
The liberals, who knew they could not attack Thomas based on his conservative
leanings, chose instead to argue that Thomas, who was only 43, was simply
too young for the high court. In addition, Thomas had been a federal judge
for only two years. The liberal American Bar Association declared that
Thomas was too inexperienced for the high court.
Unable to discredit him any other way, Biden
touted out Hill who briefly became an icon of the feminist movement. But,
in the end, Thomas credentials proved sufficient and in a 52 to
48 vote of the full Senate, Clarence Thomas became an Associate Justice
of the US Supreme Court.
Since 1938 the US Supreme Court has been used as a political devise not
to protect the sanctity of the Constitution, but rather, to promulgate
the political agenda of whichever political party that simultaneously
controls both the White House and the US Senate.
People For the American Way president Ralph
Neas in a rhetorical justification of the liberal attack on conservative
jurists, said the conservative majority on the high court has resurrected
the States rights doctrine ...that many of us believed had been
put to rest for good in the 1960s... [Insight on the News, Symposium;
pg. 40, Feb. 12, 2002]. Neas
apparently has not done an ideological head count on the high
court lately. Four of the associate justices: Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Stephen
Breyer, John Paul Stevens and David Souter are hardcore liberals. (Except
that Ginsberg is a closet conservative on States rights issuesa
fact ignored by the Clintons when they added her to the high court.) The
three conservatives (not a majority by any stretch of the imagination)
are
Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Associate Justices Antonin Scalia
and Clarence Thomas. The swing votes, which more often vote with the liberals
than the conservatives on societal issues or on rulings in which petitioners
are asking the high court to change their views on previously issued rulings,
are Sandra Day OConnor and Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy and OConnor
are generally grouped with the three solid conservative members of
the high court only because neither of them are fans of judicial activism.
Ginsberg (except in States rights issues), Breyer, Stevens and Souter
believe they have an obligation to use their power to correct
past injustices to minorities by reinterpreting the Constitution to fit
the evolving needs of a continually evolving society on the mistaken assumption
that the Founding
Fathers could not have envisioned the problems faced by a culturally diverse
society in a new century.
In reality, the Founding Fathers did take
societal evolution in consideration when they wrote the Constitution.
They provided the people with the tools they needed to amend the Constitution
at will; and gave the people the means to generate the laws needed to
guide them down the path to the future. What troubles the utopians is
that to remodel America they need to recast the rights provided by the
Constitution in such a way that government, not God, is construed as the
grantor of all rights and privileges and that the freedoms we enjoy is
not inherent.
Even more important is the evolution of law itself as the world shrinks
in distance and nations become States within a global community of nation-states
like the European Union as they surrender external sovereignty to the
invisible emprey of the United Nations, and America submits to the international
edicts and laws of the invisible government of the Utopians of the New
World Order.
Authors
Note: For a more thorough understanding of how the Roosevelt Administration
politicized the judiciary based on philosophical ideology of the left,
read Chapter 14 of WHATEVER HAPPENED TO AMERICA? To learn more about the
destruction of sovereignty in America and the emerging New World Order,
read chapters 15 through 18 of the same book. The American people need
to educate themselves on what their political leaders are doing in Washington,
and how the laws they are enacting in the nations capitol dovetail
with the agenda of the United Nations.
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