When
workmen rolled the Ten Commandments out of the Alabama
Judicial Building last summer, it was only the most recent
example of the outsized power wielded by federal judges in
America today.
No matter that former Chief Justice Roy Moore’s
monument was supported by a majority of Alabamians. No
matter that Moore’s acknowledgement of God was consistent
with the Declaration of Independence and the state
constitution, both of which acknowledge God.
A federal judge ruled that “the state may not
acknowledge the sovereignty of the Judeo-Christian God and
attribute to that God our religious freedom.” And that, we
were told, was the “rule of law.” A judgment from Olympus to
be followed, however much it was at odds with American
history, the will of Alabama voters, and our nation’s
founding document.
Today, despite the theoretical balance of power between
the three branches of government, judges have final say on
just about everything. When it comes to law and public
policy in these United States, Congress proposes, but it is
the Court that disposes.
Overruled
We, the people, have been overruled.
“We certainly have a runaway judiciary,” said Robert
Bork, a featured guest on the Coral Ridge Hour
documentary, We the People: Overruled, that airs
January 24 and 25.
He charges that federal judges routinely violate their
oath to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United
States “because they’re enforcing not the Constitution, but
their own views and the views of the class to which they
belong and to which they cater.” That class, he believes, is
the cultural left, which has used the judiciary to achieve
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through the democratic
process.
Polls, for example, consistently show a strong majority
of Americans—some 70 percent—want to ban partial-birth
abortion. Nonetheless, it took a judge just hours to set
aside a federal ban on the grisly procedure that Congress
spent seven years achieving. The same day that President
Bush signed the bill into law, a federal judge issued a
temporary injunction against it, saying it was
unconstitutional.
The judiciary’s anti-democratic impulse is also evident
in their patronage of all things homosexual. The U.S.
Supreme Court overturned a Texas anti-sodomy statute last
summer, and in November, Massachusetts’ highest court
instructed state lawmakers to legalize same-sex “marriage.”
When it comes to the acknowledgement of God, the courts
routinely ignore the will of the American public who, by
lopsided majorities, favor, for example, school prayer and
public display of the Ten Commandments.
Just
Fine With ACLU
All this, Bork notes, is just fine with the American Civil
Liberties Union, which “does not like democracy.” Unable to
advance their agenda through the legislature, they, like
most liberal interest groups, rely on their ideological
allies in the judiciary to promote their cause.
Judicial activists—judges who render rulings without
any plausible connection to the Constitution or law—tend to
regard the Constitution as a “living” document into which
they are empowered to breathe new meaning. “We are under a
Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it
is,” former Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes once said.
Please see New Special,
page 4 |
