Judging the Judges

We have discussed in several posts one of the major challenges facing America at this late stage of its cultural meltdown: the seizure of power by rogue judges. This threatens to derail many of the reforms instituted by the Trump Administration, and to further tighten the stranglehold of the Left on our collective throat. The question I ask today: From what ideological septic tank percolates this audacious assault on the political system?

To begin with, let us note that this is nothing new, though admittedly the current surge is rather extreme. Degradation of judicial practice in the United States has a long and storied history. It received notoriety during the tenure of the Warren Court (1953-1969), i.e. the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. That period overlapped the Civil Rights Era, and the Court (along with the rest of the federal judiciary) did its utmost to stretch the Bill of Rights to a degree that would have made the Founding Fathers spin in their graves.

Earlier instances of creative interpretation still bore some relation, however shaky, to the actual wording of the Constitution. But in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court gave itself the authority to extract from the Constitution whatever principles they desired. In the words of Justice William O. Douglas, “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” Penumbras and emanations, got it. Translation: We can invent any legal principle we want.

The actual text of the Constitution became irrelevant; the door was opened to Leftist bullying under cover of supposed constitutional law. This brazen attack on the foundations of the American republic paved the way for the eventual complete disregard, by Leftist judges, of due process of law; nay, of the entire Anglo-Saxon legal tradition.

Our current judicial insurrection is an outgrowth of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ seemingly inexorable march toward totalitarianism; more specifically, the expansion of the modern administrative state to monstrous proportions. This springs from a compulsion to control human behavior by means of central planning. If it can be achieved in the realms of health, economics, education, etc., then why not the political machinery itself? It is up to us, says the federal bench, to ensure that the federal government (and state and local, for that matter) dutifully obey the maxims of the Progressive canon.

In this view of the world, everything is justiciable. There can be no sphere of life that remains outside the purview of the black-robed priesthood. Whether it be the laws passed by the legislature, the executive functions of the president, or the way a man interacts with a woman, they consider it their proper role to intervene, at any time and for any reason.

​A natural result of this infinite justiciability and destruction of the rule of law is the proliferation of lawyers, courts, and lawsuits. The legal system has become the arena for the settling of every imaginable type of dispute or moral controversy, across nearly all tiers of society. Normal human life, under these conditions, is gradually asphyxiated.

To my knowledge, no individual or institution has ever slowed the progress of this bulldozer. And here we are.