Should America’s constitutional republic ever fall, the most likely cause of death will be its corrupt institutions. When citizens lose faith in the “system” and have exhausted all available remedies to “fix” that “system,” they will feel wholly disconnected from the government that rules over them. A cascade of institutional crises will exacerbate public distrust in the “system” until the “system’s” legitimacy collapses.
Should that foreboding and chaotic event come, a primary driver will have been the public’s complete loss of faith in the courts of the United States. On this point, Americans across the political spectrum will agree.
Democrats today are so hostile toward conservative members of the Supreme Court that justices have been the targets of assassination attempts and public mobs. Prominent Democrat politicians openly call for a future Democrat president and Congress to pack the Supreme Court with partisan apparatchiks. Democrat lawmakers already describe the conservative-leaning Court as “illegitimate” and a “threat to democracy” — not-so-subtle rhetorical invitations for violent knuckle-draggers from their own party to “protect democracy” by murdering “illegitimate” justices.
Non-leftists (Republicans, conservatives, constitutionalists, and defenders of personal liberty) have their own serious issues with the federal courts. For decades, Democrats in the Senate have been unscrupulous in their willingness to scuttle judicial nominees from Republican presidents by orchestrating elaborate smear campaigns designed to make confirmations impossible.
Retired justice Anthony Kennedy is out with a new book this month about his thirty-year tenure on the Supreme Court, but the only reason he has a book to sell is because Democrats waged an effective public relations war against the confirmation of highly competent conservative Judge Robert Bork. Because President Reagan’s stellar nominee was prevented from taking his seat on the Court, Americans got stuck with Kennedy’s wet-noodle jurisprudence.
Democrats’ successful propaganda efforts to embarrass conservative nominees — including their ongoing lies that justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh are sexual predators — have discouraged several generations of conservatives with stellar legal minds from pursuing judicial careers. Those conservatives who do join the bench remain targets of harassment and intimidation from Democrat-organized mobs.
Even more concerning for non-leftist Americans than Democrat-inspired intimidation of conservative judges, however, is the continuing aggrandizement of local district court judges. It seems that not a day goes by without some federal judge far from Washington, D.C., instructing the president of the United States how to execute the duties of his office. Random judges purport to have the power to order President Trump around whenever he does something that offends their partisan sensibilities. District court judges pretend to be commanders in chief, experts in foreign policy, and the final authorities on how the Executive Branch manages executive agencies.
Because federal judges enjoy lifetime tenures, they should perform their duties with incomparable restraint. Instead, too many now rule as kings and queens.
There are roughly seven hundred federal district court judges. When they insist on exercising a veto power over the president of the United States, they warp the Constitution’s structure by elevating the will of unelected judges above the discretion of an elected president.
Judicial review — the recognized authority of the Judicial Branch to invalidate laws and government actions when they are deemed to violate the Constitution — gives courts a unique power over Congress and the White House. Although the Founding Fathers seemed to anticipate and generally agree that the Supreme Court would determine when laws or executive orders are unconstitutional, there was ample debate as to whether judges should be empowered to act as supra-legislators who could rewrite or nullify acts of Congress. If the branches are truly coequal, after all, why should the Legislative or Executive Branches have any less authority when it comes to faithfully executing their constitutional obligations?
Furthermore, recognizing the Supreme Court as having the authority to declare a legislative or executive act as unconstitutional is quite different from giving an obscure district court judge such expansive authority. The first sentence of the first section of Article III states, “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 ordain and establish.” In other words, the U.S. Constitution requires nothing more than one federal judge to serve on the Supreme Court.
When the federal government is limited in size and authority, it seems fairly reasonable to recognize that the person vested with Article III powers would be in an ideal position to judge when Congress or the president exceeds the limits of the Constitution. As a legal process, judicial review gives the Supreme Court an important “check” on the other branches’ powers. When the awesome powers of the Judicial Branch are delegated to seven hundred district court judges, however, unfettered judicial review looks more like a coup.
Voters elect four hundred and thirty-five members of the House of Representatives, one hundred members of the Senate, a president, and a vice president to execute faithfully their constitutional duties. Then seven hundred unelected judges whom nobody knows presume to have the final say over what those elected officials can constitutionally do. Whatever the Founding Fathers had in mind, they surely did not intend for some Portland judge to usurp the president’s authority as commander in chief. Such judicial overreach delegitimizes the courts in the minds of the American people. Republics have fallen for less.
This article was originally published on American Thinker.
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