Around The Web

I occasionally participate in online discussions IF the website is one where people demonstrate the ability to think outside the box.  Recently I posted a couple of comments that strike me as worthy of sharing here.

The first one is my response to a self-described lawyer named "George" who couldn't understand why I had said that the Constitution is not whatever the Supreme Court says.  The fact that a lawyer would ask such a question speaks volumes about the state of modern legal education.  His question was posed as a challenge for me to define what "speech" means under the First Amendment, as if his view of judicial supremacy were self-evident.  I disabused him of that notion:

Delayed response to George's question about how to find meaning in some of the Constitution's vagaries. Unless I'm mistaken, the gist of his question is that it only makes sense to rely on the Supreme Court to iron these wrinkles out, a notion I completely reject.

First, the Supreme Court's role is simply to decide cases and controversies. Sometimes the Court must interpret the Constitution to perform this function, but those interpretations are binding solely on the litigating parties and the lower courts -- they do not bind anyone else. Every branch of the federal government has a duty to uphold the Constitution, so if the Court issues a cockeyed pronouncement, the other branches can and MUST disregard it. So should the States, according to none other than Thomas Jefferson and the very "father" of the Constitution, James Madison. To believe otherwise is to believe that the federal government is the final arbiter of its own powers, which is the quintessence of tyranny.

Second, the Supreme Court has gone beyond its function of "judicial review" (i.e., constitutional enforcement) and claims the right to update the Constitution to fit modern times (i.e., constitutional amendment). This is a grotesque usurpation, for the amendment process is spelled out in Article V of the Constitution and requires legislative supermajorities among the States and Congress. Once again, to propose that a simple majority of five lawyers out of nine may amend the Constitution is tyrannical in the extreme.

And third, as to the meaning of "speech" in the First Amendment, it's important to recall that the Bill of Rights was drafted to apply solely to the federal government, as John Marshall held in Barron v. Baltimore. The Supreme Court has twisted the 14th Amendment (which was illegally passed, by the way) to mean that the federal government may apply the Bill of Rights -- and "penumbras" and "emanations" thereof -- to States and thus perpetually censor their laws, which inverts the constitutional order and makes the federal government master rather than servant. There is no need to tie ourselves in knots over what "speech" means. The answer is simple. A State law is presumptively valid and falls within the vast reservoir of power that the States kept via the 10th Amendment -- unless the law violates one of the few prohibitions on the States such as ex post facto, bill of attainder, or impairment of contract, it survives. A federal law is presumptively invalid because 1) the federal government has only enumerated powers, so the law must point to its constitutional source, and 2) even those enumerated powers may not be used in violation of the Bill of Rights, which is really just a redundant safety device. As to Citizens United (which I assume you're driving at), that was a federal law restricting how corporations could spend their own money with regard to political messages. Even if there is no "speech" in this equation, such a law has no constitutional basis anyway. But the regulation was directly tethered to the type of spending, and that type was political speech, so it was doubly invalid.

My second comment was a response to a post on a popular blog.  The blogger shares my (and many other people's) understanding that Western civilization is collapsing.  He focused on the Moon landing as marking the culmination of Western achievement, noting that we have lost the ability to duplicate that feat and backslid on many fronts ever since.  I threw out this generic observation:

Success always contains the seeds of its own destruction. In the case of human society, those seeds are the people born into wealth and plenty, who take those miracles as a given. Leftism sprouts from these seeds and identifies any lingering want or injustice as intolerable, demanding that political force be used to eradicate them. After that it is only a matter of time until the foundations of success collapse.

Like a great star that begins processing iron at its core, a great society that begins processing leftists at its core is doomed.