The Supreme Court Is A Mirage

I.

Nine people shouldn't have the final say over disputes among 300 million people. I don't care if they're the oldest lawyers in America. I also don't care that they work in a Greek temple replica in a swamp in Virginia, dressed in black wizard's robes like Hogwarts students. None of that impresses me. In the end they're just nine people like you and me. What gives them the right to order anyone around? Because they were picked by the winner of a nationwide popularity contest? Because they were confirmed by 51 winners of statewide popularity contests? Because the people who decide those winners are so informed and rational about politics?

II.

What are you saying, Wes? You don't believe in the Constitution? I thought you were a libertarian for God's sake!

No I believe in the Constitution. Of course I believe in it. I've read the whole thing. And after I got to the end of the document, I realized something that seems like it might be relevant–

The only people who signed it were these guys (in 1787, on the inside of a sheep skin, with a feather dipped in ink):

Attest William Jackson Secretary Go: Washington -Presidt. and deputy from Virginia Showing George Washington's signature. Delaware Geo: Read Gunning Bedford jun John Dickinson Richard Bassett Jaco: Broom Maryland James McHenry Dan of St Thos. Jenifer Danl Carroll. Virginia John Blair— James Madison Jr. North Carolina Wm Blount Richd. Dobbs Spaight. Hu Williamson South Carolina J. Rutledge Charles Cotesworth Pinckney Charles Pinckney Pierce Butler. Georgia William Few Abr Baldwin New Hampshire John Langdon Nicholas Gilman Massachusetts Nathaniel Gorham Rufus King Connecticut Wm. Saml. Johnson Roger Sherman New York Alexander Hamilton New Jersey Wil. Livingston David Brearley. Wm. Paterson. Jona: Dayton Pennsylvania B Franklin Thomas Mifflin Robt Morris Geo. Clymer Thos. FitzSimons Jared Ingersoll James Wilson. Gouv Morris

Yep, nope. I don't see my signature anywhere in there. Do you see yours? Did you sign that? Did any of us? Nope!

No living person in America today ever signed that. It's the charter document of a corporation responsible for two centuries and a half of mass theft, murder, and mayhem, under the pretense of law and order. And none of us ever agreed in writing to any of it.

Frankly I do think it'd be a pretty damn good start just to go by what it says in there, but the truth is none of these politicians believe in the Constitution. It might as well be toilet paper to them. They're not even pretending to try to keep it anymore.

This isn't a nation governed by laws. It's just Game of Thrones writ large, an unsavory cast of ambitious psychopaths fighting each other to sit on the throne and pull the levers of power.

III.

So what are you saying you prefer– anarchy?

No. I'm saying this is anarchy. You already have it now. There's just 300 million different individual people living within the borders of the U.S., living out their lives and pursuit-ing their happiness, and most of them know how to behave and treat others with respect and dignity; they're able to govern themselves.

But those who style themselves the rulers, the lawmakers, the keepers of order– are clearly grabbing as much money and power as they can by violating as much of the Constitution, the entire notion of law and order as they can possibly get away with.

At this point in U.S. history, how many blatantly unconstitutional things has our government done? Hmmm? How many billions of dollars of American wealth has been appropriated to be tied up in massive cabinet-level bureaucracies that wouldn't even exist if lawmakers were keeping to the Constitution?

IV.

That's why I say the Supreme Court is stupid.

Ever since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, their entire purpose is to make sure the damn U.S. isn't stepping outside the bounds of the Constitution, and if that's the measure of their success as an institution they are a failure of titanic proportions!

Actual picture of the Supreme Court
safeguarding your Constitutional rights.

(Trump Supporter:) That's why it's so important we keep electing good Republican presidents, so we can undo the damage all the liberals have done and start restraining government to its proper role within the Constitution!

So you think Republican appointees to this great nation's High (Out Of Its Mind) Court have been doing their best to keep the federal government in check, and that it's only been the Democratic appointees' fault that the U.S. has gotten so out of control violating the Constitution? Impossible! For the last fifty years there have been 19 Supreme Court appointments...

Democrats appointed five of them.

Republicans appointed fourteen.

If you look at the amount of years spent deciding cases by each "Justice" and break it down by party appointment, the ratio is about the same. So don't come in here with that partisan claptrap, and all your chants and slogans and hats.

Republicans are not libertarian. They are not constitutionalists or strict constructionists. They are not even conservative. They're just branded that way for the unwitting masses to consume, and are no more different from Democrats than Coke is from Pepsi.

Republican presidents and their Supreme Court appointees have been pouring fuel on the fire of the federal government's unconstitutional conflagration of unchecked, chaotic tyranny.

V.

Don't believe me?

I'll give you an example.

Was ObamaCare constitutional?

Wait a second, back up a minute...

Is the entire cabinet level Department of Health and Human Services with its $1 trillion annual budget constitutional?

Hmmmmmm.....

Amendment X (reserved powers):

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Okay.....

Article I, Section 8 (enumerated powers):

(spoiler alert– it's not in there)

The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States; To borrow Money on the credit of the United States; To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes; To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization, and uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States; To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures; To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States; To establish Post Offices and post Roads; To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries; To constitute Tribunals inferior to the supreme Court; To define and punish Piracies and Felonies committed on the high Seas, and Offences against the Law of Nations; To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years; To provide and maintain a Navy; To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces; To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions; To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; To exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over such District (not exceeding ten Miles square) as may, by Cession of particular States, and the Acceptance of Congress, become the Seat of the Government of the United States, and to exercise like Authority over all Places purchased by the Consent of the Legislature of the State in which the Same shall be, for the Erection of Forts, Magazines, Arsenals, dock-Yards, and other needful Buildings;—And To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.

Yeah, that would be a "No." There's nothing in the Constitution that says the United States has any role to play in the practice of medicine in America, and there's something in the Constitution that says if it doesn't specifically enumerate a power for the federal government, then the federal government's not allowed to do it.

So what gives?

The Supreme Court gives.

Like a cheeto for a deadbolt on a door.

VI.

Conservatives complain about judicial activism all the time, as in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, wherein these nine unelected wise ones jumped through the rim of their own butt crack holes to hallucinate a Constitutionally protected right to abortion.

As the Washington Examiner puts it:

'[The Supreme Court] found a “right to privacy” “emanating” from the Bill of Rights, and that emanation cast a “penumbra” in which the court spotted a fundamental right to abort an unborn baby up to the moment of birth. The ruling held that, in effect, states may not make laws to protect the unborn baby until the seventh month of pregnancy. Even in the final trimester, the court ordered states to grant a broad “health of the mother” exception to any restrictions on abortion. Plenty of legal scholars who support abortion rights nevertheless admit that the ruling was garbage. “[B]ehind its own verbal smokescreen,” liberal legal scholar Laurence Tribe wrote, “the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” “As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method,” pro-choice Harry Blackmun clerk Ed Lazarus wrote, “Roe borders on the indefensible.” Roe “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be,” wrote liberal constitutional law professor John Hart Ely of Yale, Harvard, and Stanford Law Schools. Jeffrey Rosen wrote in the New Republic, “Thirty years after Roe, the finest constitutional minds in the country still have not been able to produce a constitutional justification for striking down restrictions on early-term abortions that is substantially more convincing than Justice Harry Blackmun’s famously artless opinion itself.” So, in 1992, when Kennedy and the High Court had a chance to review the opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, it was reasonable to expect this deformed legal aberration would be discarded. It nearly was, as Kennedy is said to have been persuaded to change sides. In the end, he produced his unique and inventive brand of judicial mysticism. “At the heart of liberty,” Kennedy wrote in Casey, “is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”'

And I'm with conservatives against judicial activism insofar as legislating from the bench is concerned, but wouldn't it be nice if the courts were less passive about enforcing the Constitution against the untrammeled, breakneck expansion of the federal government into every aspect of our lives, steamrolling over the constitutional guarantees of liberty every step of the way?

VII.

So back to the "Affordable Care Act," named as it is in the most astonishingly Orwellian fashion. There can be no getting around the fact that ObamaCare is unconstitutional because there is no enumerated power of the federal government in Article I or II of the Constitution allowing for it to compel its citizens to purchase insurance. That's even more of a mirage in the rightfully barren desert of constitutionally enumerated powers than the right to abort is a hallucination of guaranteed protections.

Okay now, MAGA hats: for the million dollar grand prize, the all expenses paid vacation to Ambergris Caye, and the neeeww car– which Supreme Court Justice was the swing vote that incredibly upheld ObamaCare as perfectly within the bounds of the U.S. Constitution? And the answer is....

Chief Justice John Roberts!
Appointed by REPUBLICAN President George W. Bush!

And the million dollar grand prize, all expenses paid vacation, and new car go to some big wig health insurance executive.

Doesn't matter what you answered– your prize is higher insurance premiums and higher deductibles. Thanks for playing!

VIII.

But it gets even better. Come stand at the edge of the abyss with me and peer in. Do you remember what John Robert's legal argument was as to why ObamaCare was constitutional?

Oh it's bitterly absurd. If this shit doesn't redpill you into complete despairing disillusionment with the entire federal system and the farce of constitutional government there's nothing I can do for you. You are hopelessly, willfully lost in state-loving, bootlicking, partisan la la land. Okay ready for it?

Writing in an opinion for himself in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts upheld ObamaCare's individual mandate (requiring Americans to purchase health insurance policies) on the basis that the fine imposed by Congress on anyone who doesn't buy an insurance product from a private financial corporation is constitutional because of Congress' power to tax:

"..it is abundantly clear the Constitution does not guarantee that individuals may avoid taxation through inactivity. A capitation, after all, is a tax that everyone must pay simply for existing, and capitations are expressly contemplated by the Constitution. The Court today holds that our Constitution protects us from federal regulation under the Commerce Clause so long as we abstain from the regulated activity. But from its creation, the Constitution has made no such promise with respect to taxes. The individual mandate cannot be upheld as an exercise of Congress's power under the Commerce Clause. That Clause authorizes Congress to regulate interstate commerce, not to order individuals to engage in it. In this case, however, it is reasonable to construe what Congress has done as increasing taxes on those who have a certain amount of income, but choose to go without health insurance. Such legislation is within Congress's power to tax."

Only one problem with that.

And it's kind of a big problem.

The U.S. Senate passed ObamaCare in December 2009.

Then the U.S. House approved the bill in March 2010.

Problem is....

Article I Section 7. All Bills for raising...

...Revenue shall originate in the...

...House of Representatives[!!!]

IX.

Yes. This government in Washington is a mafia state that does as much as it can get away with to plunder, control, and destroy, not a constitutional government. Still think electing Republicans is going to help keep the federal government in check?

Then you're the reason why it's so out of control.

It's as apparent with the Supreme Court as it is with the White House and Congress, that it doesn't matter who you put in there. Fighting over that is a waste of time. The entire bloody edifice is structurally rotten. This Is The United States.