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By Linda Bowles
3 July 2001
© 2001 WorldNetDaily.com
If there were
any lingering doubts that the Constitution of the United
States is largely irrelevant to what our government is now
doing and plans to do in the future, recent events have surely
dispelled them. Actually, for some time, that tattered old
document has had little to do with the actions of legislators,
judges and presidents. Most of our laws have essentially no
traceable or definable relationship to the letter or the
spirit of the Constitution.
This is to say,
it wouldn't take much to push the Constitution off the
judicial stage and into, as we commentators like to say, the
garbage can of history. Time will tell whether such a push was
recently administered by Sen. Charles Schumer, in his capacity
as chairman of the Judiciary Courts subcommittee.
On June 26,
2001, Sen. Schumer advised all attentive Americans that the
Democrat members of the U.S. Senate would apply ideological
(political) litmus tests to judges nominated by President
George W. Bush. Nominees will be asked questions about their
personal and legal positions on key issues, including but not
limited to: abortion, gun control, homosexual rights, campaign
financing, tobacco legislation, states rights, property
rights, school choice, environmentalism and separation of
church and state.
To what end?
Sen. Schumer makes it crystal clear by asserting that the
Senate has the right to oppose nominees "whose views fall
outside the mainstream." In this context, it is not
inappropriate to note that on most of these issues, the
ideology of most conservatives falls well outside Sen.
Schumer's personal "mainstream."
Sen. Schumer's
announcement of his party's intention to do ideological tests
runs counter to 200 years of tradition, during which the
Senate, with a few exceptions, conscientiously worked at
insulating judges from politics.
Tom Jipping of
the Free Congress Foundation spoke for many legal experts when
he noted in the Washington Times that "demanding to know
how a judge will rule on issues is demanding that he violate
his judicial oath before even taking it."
It may be
confidently asserted that if former Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Orrin Hatch had announced in advance that he and
other Republicans planned to probe Supreme Court nominee Ruth
Bader Ginsburg's liberal views and vote against her
confirmation if she seemed too radical, the mainstream media
would still be howling over the unfair litmus test.
In retrospect,
this aggressive move by the Democrats to politicize the courts
could have been expected. In his last debate with Bill
Bradley, Al Gore declared that "the Constitution is a
living and breathing document ... intended by our founders to
be interpreted in the light of the constantly evolving
experience of the American people."
George
Washington was truly familiar with what was intended by our
Founders. He said this in his Farewell Address: "the
Constitution ... till changed by an explicit and authentic act
of the whole people, is sacredly obligatory upon all.
..." He emphasized his point with these words: "Let
there be no change by usurpation ... it is the customary
weapon by which free governments are destroyed."
The
Constitution has been changed by usurpation. It was not
amended to legalize the expansion of the federal government.
For example, the 10th Amendment to the Constitution, which
limits the federal government to specific powers, while
retaining everything else for the states and the people, was
not repealed – it was simply abandoned.
At the other
extreme, a simple clause in the Constitution dealing with
interstate commerce, to keep states from setting up trade
barriers, was expanded to mean the federal government could do
essentially anything it wanted to do. As the Constitution was
being turned upside down and perverted, a succession of
presidents and legislators, vows forgotten, looked on as
silent accessories.
In 1907, Chief
Justice Charles Evans Hughes inadvertently prophesied the
death of constitutional government when he proclaimed,
"the Constitution is what the judges say it is."
His thought was
echoed by former U.S. Associate Justice Felix Frankfurter in
1949: "The words of the Constitution ... are so
unrestricted by their intrinsic meaning or by their history or
by tradition or by prior decisions that they leave the
individual Justice free, if indeed they do not compel him, to
gather meaning not from reading the Constitution but from
reading life."
Frankfurter
might as well have said, as did Louis XIV, "L'etat, c'est
moi." (I am the state.)
The struggle in
America today is between those who want to return us to
constitutional principles and the religious values that
inspired them, and those who have been corrupted by their
fraudulently acquired power and cannot bear the thought of
returning it to its rightful owners, namely the people.
We are on the
slippery slope. |
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