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Supreme Larceny:

An Unexpurgated History of the Supreme Court

 

Our founders designed a government with three independent branches, each with a limited role to play.  The role of the judicial branch was limited to deciding "cases and controversies" in accordance with laws made by elected representatives of "We the People."  As Alexander Hamilton explained the constitutional design in Federalist Number 78,

The Judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or wealth of the society, and can take no active resolution whatever.  It may truly be said to have neither force nor will but merely judgement; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgements.
Hamilton went on to assure his fellow citizens in Federalist Number 81 that they could rely on Congress to punish "judiciary encroachments on the legislative authority" by impeachment and removal of the encroaching judges.
There never can be danger that the judges, by a series of deliberate usurpations on the authority of the legislature, would hazard the united resentment of the body intrusted (sic) with it (the power of impeachment and removal), while this body was possessed of the means of punishing their presumption, by degrading them from their stations.
Our founders depended on the integrity of future Supreme Court justices to restrain them from transgressing their constitutional limits.  They depended on the integrity of future presidents to refuse to enforce fraudulent Supreme Court rulings.  And they depended on the courage and integrity of future congressmen to impeach and remove renegade judges regardless of the partisan issues involved.  Our founders were a bit too optimistic on all three counts.  Fraudulent Supreme Court rulings often have a fair amount of support among political elites, so a political movement with sufficient strength to defy or punish them has rarely emerged.

The U. S. Supreme Court is constantly bombarded with requests to extend the law into uncharted territory; often the request is based on a novel, even preposterous, constitutional interpretation.  Usually a Court majority cannot be found to go along; the justices do not want to take fresh liberties with the Constitution every day, and a majority does not often share a strong emotional commitment to the goals of whatever special interest group presented the request.

However, sometimes a creative plaintiff strikes pay dirt; a Court majority is willing to play ball.  And an opinion comes down which asserts that the Constitution contains a previously undiscovered mandate, the assertion having no basis in the text of the Constitution and plainly contrary to the intent of the people who framed and ratified the relevant constitutional passages.  That opinion becomes a precedent for future cases in the Supreme Court and all lower courts.  So it's tantamount to a constitutional amendment with no input from us or our elected representatives.  It's popular among various elites to defend this process by claiming that we have a "living Constitution" which evolves to incorporate Supreme Court policy innovations.

It's undeniable that the Court has no legitimate power to revise the Constitution, although we do trust it to faithfully apply, to new situations, principles that "We the People" placed in that eminent document.  That trust does not entitle the Court to hand down constitutional rulings that are driven by the justices' own biases, unsupported by the language of the Constitution, and clearly contrary to the intent of the people who framed, adopted, and ratified its various articles and amendments.  God forbid that our original written Constitution has been replaced by a bogus one which "evolves" according to the policy preferences of our judicial employees.

Unfortunately, that's the way it really is.  Nobody is in a position to keep the Court honest, so it "evolves" the Constitution at will.  Unelected judges with lifetime appointments contrive to enact our most important laws, making a mockery of our constitutional guarantee of a "Republican Form of Government."

Politicians, historians and legal scholars have long acknowledged that judicial invention of constitutional mandates is routine; they tolerate, or even support, the practice because they often like the results.  They tell each other that Supreme Court innovations tend to produce better public policy than the efforts of elected politicians who can't afford to get too far out in front of the voters.  Supreme Larceny takes a critical look at this claim and concludes that it's historically unfounded; stealth legislation by the Supreme Court has led to a long list of national catastrophes.

Fraudulent, or at least speculative, constitutional interpretations by our employees on the Supreme Court:

Blocked effective enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, keeping African Americans in parts of the South in a condition of peonage for seventy years;
Helped cause the Civil War and the Great Depression;
Gave us 100,000 extra murders and half-a-million extra rapes between 1970 and 1990;
Ruined 20 million educations during the last three decades, wasting $100 billion of the taxpayers' money in the process;
Invented brand new constitutional protections for abortion, flag burning, and pornography.

 

The essays on this web site expand on themes in the book,

The Temple of Karnak: How Rogue Judges Have Been Strangling Your Democracy

by

D. J. Connolly

 

 

If anyone should pay reparations for slavery and discrimination, it's those whose forebears were most at fault.

 

Learn the straight story on judicial efforts to steal the 2000 Presidential Election.

 

The Supreme Court has long imposed an alien religion on your community in defiance of the First Amendment.

 

Find out what's going to happen to the Second Amendment.

 

Read a review of capital punishment issues.

 

Read an unexpurgated account of the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education coup.

 

Learn about sexual-predator-priests and the "Secular Papacy."

 

Learn the politically correct way to lobby the Supreme Court.

 

Learn what our founders really thought about abortion, gay rights, and gender equity.

 

Learn how the ayatollahs on our Supreme Court helped cause voter apathy;

 

The Supreme Court is America's oldest and most successful organized crime syndicate.

 

Learn about the Warren Court's heritage in the rampages of medieval Vikings.

 

School funding equity rulings by state courts are making public schools even more inefficient than they already were.

 

There will be no effective tort reform absent stern measures to discipline our out-of-control judicial employees.

 

Truth is stranger than fiction.

 

 

 

All Rights Reserved
D. J. Connolly