Jon Christian Ryter's Conservative World

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From The Mailbag

The Supreme Court needs to do its job instead of
violating their oath of office...the Bill of Rights is at
stake. They need to hear Padilla v Hanft.

Constitution: Article IIIl Section1-2: "The judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may, from time to time, order and establish. The judges, both of the Supreme Court and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior...the judical power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under the Constitution...the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact..."" Constitution: 6th Amendment: "In criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district where the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by laws, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses agaisnt him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and have the assistance of counsel for his defense."

On June 13, 2005, the United States Supreme Court raised the white flag and tacitly surrendered to President George W. Bush. In doing so, the high court rendered as "meaningless rhetoric" Article III, Sections 1 and 2 of the Constitution by apathetically affirming, through its silence, the legal right of the Bush Administration to suspend the most sacrosanct political document in the United States—the Bill of Rights.

When he signed the USA Patriot Act into law on October 26, 2001, Bush became the third US president to seize dictatorial power over the United States and the American people under the guise of a "national emergency"—the trite phrase first coined by Franklin D. Roosevelt on the day he assumed office on March 6, 1933—and artfully used until the Supreme Court finally got tired of hearing it and began, two years later, to dismantle the very unconstitutional New Deal laws that created the fourth branch of government—the bureaucracy.

Two things stopped the high court from carrying out their constitutional responsibility—voiding all of the unconstitutional laws created by the New Deal Congress. First, the justices themselves feared FDR who tried, first, to add six new justices to the high court who would follow his bidding. When he did not succeed in increasing the number of justices on the high court, FDR tried to force four members of the high court to retire so he could replace them with lackeys who would give him the judicial decisions he needed to successfully dissolve the American Republic and replace it with a more socialist version of democracy. Second, once the justices were given pensions equal to their full pay, three of them stepped down within a year and Roosevelt was able to politicize the US Supreme Court—a practice that has continued to this day (and the reason for the current judicial standoff in Congress).

Today, the separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government have all but vanished. The intent of the Founding Fathers was that each branch of government would be a watchdog of the others. The intentions of the Founders was diluted by the introduction of an unelected 4th branch of government—the bureaucracy—which virtually answers to no one and actually writes the "laws" and runs the government. The bureaucracy (which is influenced more today by the globalist views of the utopians in the Council on Foreign Relations and the edicts of five or six key Foundations—like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Trust and the ultra left Pew and Soros Foundations than it is by the US Code*) has become the adhesive that glues the separate branches of government into a cohesive authorative, super-governing body. (The philosphical bickering in Congress comes from the worldview differences of the various Foundations—socialism verses free enterprise capitalism—that pulls the Congressional chains through the use of morally (if not legally) wrong campaign contributions that indenture politician to the various invisible power barons.

That is, after all, how unconstitutional laws get on the books. It is also why the checks and balances so diligently stitched into the threads of liberty by the Founding Fathers are now unraveling. We have allowed our State and federal courts to become politicized. Party politics, not the rule of law, determines the type of justice meted by our judges. Liberty has removed its blindfold and now has to physically "see" those charged by the judiciary to determine whether social justice or the rule of law will be the yardstick applied to determine the guilt or innocent of those charged—or eveb whether justice will be held in abeyance because it best serves the needs of government to rob one ot two citizens of the guarantees pledged to them by the Constitution of the United States.

If liberty can stolen by government edict from just one citizen—the worst citizen—then it can be robbed from the rest of us by that same government since, if our liberty is not an inherent right, it can be construed as a conditional right that can be extended or requitted upon the whims of government.

That is why both conservatives and liberals, socalists and free enterprise capitalists, nationalists and globalists within the United States have found common ground on one core bedrock issue that Christian conservatives who have fought the American Civil Liberties Union since 1925 now stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them in opposition to renewal of the USA Patriot Act. It's bad law. It's unconstitutional. Congress had no legal authority to enact. The US Supreme Court—which just decided not to weigh into the unalwful detention of a US citizen, Jose Padilla— violated its oath to protect the Constitution because the Bush Administration is using a Rooseveltian ploy to declare that the current national emergency justifies the use of unconstitutional means.

The leader of the anti-USA Patriot Act pack (or, in this case, PAC—Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances), former Congressman Bob Barr [R-GA] who led the fight to impeach President Bill Clinton has joined with three of the most influential conservatives in Washington, DC: David Keene, head of the American Conservative Union, Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, Phyllis Schlafly, head of Eagle Forum and late-comer Brad Jansen of the Competitive Enterprise Institute—and the ultra-left American Civil Liberties Union to kill the Patriot Act whose sunset clause will revoke the legislation later this year if Congress (which is meeting in secret to keep it alive) does not extend it. If Congress votes to make the Patriot Act permanent it is likely they will also incorporate the tenets of Patriot Act II into it. Patriot Act II contains the HR 666 abrogations of the Bill of Rights that John Ashcroft could not push through Congress in October, 2001. Two staffers on Capitol Hill told me that the leadership, working closely with the White House, have secretly added portions of Ashcroft's Patriot II wish list (that have not already been enacted in other pieces of legisation) into the bill that will kill the USA Patriot Act sunset clause. The legislation will then be enacted with a voice vote so that the constituents of the Congressmen and Senators will not be able to determine which way their federal legislators voted. That will allow all of the Congressmen and Senators who voted to extend the Patriot Act to deny it to their constituents when they campaign for reelection in November, 2006.

I have always felt the the protection afforded by the Constitution—the Bill of Rights—was an insurance policy for American citizens...only. Extending that right to al Qaeda terrorists who are citizens of Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iran or the Euroasian "stans" is stupid. Extending them the "limited" rights provided by the UN Declaration of Human Rights is more reasonable since those restrictive, limited rights are theoretically guaranteed by those countries.

But what about American-born terrorists—or accused terrorists—like Jose Padilla, John Walker Lindh or Yaser Esam Hamdi? What rights, if any, is an American citizen entitled to when he takes up arms against his country or countrymen—or is accused of plotting to take up arms against his country, or plotting to detonate a dirty bomb in the United States, or blow up a shopping mall?

That individual—providing he is a natural born, not naturalized, citizen—is nevertheless entitled to every protection afforded under the Constitution of the United States. He is guaranteed those rights by his American heritage even when it is not convenient for government to provide them. They are inherent. That means because they are God-given, government cannot take them from him. Yet in the case of Jose Padilla and Yasser Esam Hamdi, American citizens, the government argued they were "enemy combatants" and, as such, do not need to be charged with a crime, nor allowed to face their accusers—or stand trial before a jury of their peers to determine their guilt or innocence.

Well, whatever its merit, once again you have my two cents worth.

*It is important to understand that while Congress writes the laws, they are "bare bones" with absolutely no meat on them when they are signed into law. Once they become law, the bureaucracy writes the regulations and actually creates the sustance of the law which is then enforced by the responsible agency or, if the laws deal with criminal activity, the appropriate law enforcement agencies. Many times over the past 100 years the Supreme Court has found that the regulations, written and enforced by the bureaucracy, are diametrically opposite of the intent of the law.