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Responsibility #22
(written prior to July 1992)
To the People of the United States of America:
The quote from Thomas Jefferson in Responsibility #21 bears repeating: "The care of human life and happiness, and not their destruction, is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
We will continue in this and subsequent papers to discuss, how the creation and (in effect) legislation of new freedoms, rights, and privacies by the Supreme Court, have proven to be contrary to the object of good government. They have also been in opposition to the reasons, why We the People did ordain and establish our Constitution.
In Responsibility #15 through #21, and in this and several subsequent essays, the weakened and immoral condition of our country has been primarily laid on the shoulders of our Supreme Court. Some may consider this unfair. Indeed, if the confluence of the following factors in the 1960s and 1970s had not occurred, perhaps the Court would have exercised greater judicial restraint:
1. the internal rending of the nation by the unpopular, undeclared, and poorly handled Vietnam War.
2. the marches, riots, and lack of discipline of some of our citizens.
3. Watergate and other reasons for lack of respect for our government.
4. the political inertia that held back corrections to civil and social problems.
5. the overwhelming concentration of the civil and social problems in certain regions, states or cities.
But to whom much is given, much is required! Our founding fathers were confident that the privileged position given to the Judiciary would cause them to diligently stay in their bounds.
The impatient attempts of the Supreme Court to eliminate school segregation, by forcing integration through school busing, was a usurpation and a disaster. The Court should have restricted itself to judgment. Under the Constitution, it had neither the power of the purse, nor the force of the sword, to correct the condition that it properly found wanting. It had neither the organization nor the talent (in itself and in the inferior federal court system) to define, legislate, and fairly and consistently execute a feasible program.
It did not recognize that school segregation could not be treated, without concurrently addressing the more comprehensive economic and social problems of Afro-Americans. The Court had not the sageness to anticipate that forced integration of schools would merely exacerbate the segregation of the races, and worsen the economic conditions of the blacks.
Interested readers will find enlightening the following books: (1) "Disaster by Decree--The Supreme Court Decisions on Race and the Schools" by Lino A. Graglia; and (2) "The Promised Land--The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America" by Nicholas Lemann.
We will touch upon segregation and school busing again under the headings of Education and Poverty in later essays. Suffice it to say at this point that school busing is a sorry, costly, and ineffective means of helping to solve our social problems.
Our nation has endured BAD GOVERNMENT, and continuing compromises of the objectives of our Constitution, in the areas of freedoms. Government has permitted and fostered the freedoms of speech and the press to be extended, by the entertainment and communications industries, to the degradation of We the People, and otherwise to the "destruction" "of [our] human life and happiness." Government has placed so great an emphasis on not making any law [nor permitting any practice] that might appear to some faction as "respecting an establishment of religion", that it has in effect prohibited "the free exercise thereof".
The Supreme Court, through its findings (and its lack or deferment of findings) has played a principal role in this BAD GOVERNMENT. We will discuss in greater detail the need (and proposals) for corrections to these areas of misgovernment under the headings of Responsibilities, Family, Education, and Health Hazards.
The record of our government has been at best inconsistent and checkered in the area of property. Our founding fathers were very sensitive about property rights. The term property was sometimes used in the narrow sense of real property (land, buildings, commercial enterprises, etc.), and at other times in the broader scope including earning power, talents, education, et al. Throughout our nation's history, property rights have been respected for a time, and later compromised or changed to fit the needs or the moods, of our politicians and factions in our society.
In the twentieth century, and continuing at present, the major controversial property rights areas include: laissez faire, confiscatory taxes (particularly income taxes), guns, due process, equal protection, necessary and proper laws, and litigation. These will be discussed, and remedies for abuses will be proposed under various topic headings in later papers. Again, findings of the Supreme Court have been prominent participants in the disunity, and lack of "care of human life and happiness", brought on by our less than "good government."
When one ponders the gravity of the consequences of the judicial errors of the Supreme Court, an analogy comes to mind of the parable of "The Rich Man and Lazarus." (St. Luke 16 verses 19-31) Picture the Justice, who spearheaded the Roe v. Wade abortion decision (or any other deceased Supreme Court member who concurred in decisions for immoral rights and privacies), as the Rich Man asking for relief from his torments in Hell. After Abraham denied him relief, the Justice said: "Then, father, I beseech thee to send [Lazarus] to the [Supreme Court], for I have [eight Brethren and a Sister], that he may testify to them [to undo the wrongs that the Court has done], lest they too come into this place of torments." And Abraham said to him, "They have the [Constitution]: let them hearken to [it]."
In the next four papers we will examine: how the Court can be made to harken to the Constitution, how it can play a larger role in assuring good and timely government, and how its past judicial errors may be corrected.
Publius IV
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