ZGram - 11/25/2004 - "Sobran: How Tyranny Came to America" - Part IV

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

November 25, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:


[START]

How Tyranny Came to America - Part IV


Roosevelt's Court soon decided that the Tenth Amendment was a 
"truism," of no real force. This meant that almost any federal act 
was ipso facto constitutional, and the powers "reserved" to the 
states and the people were just leftovers the federal government 
didn't want, like the meal left for the jackals by the satisfied 
lion. There was almost no limit, now, on what the federal government 
could do. In effect, the powers of the federal government no longer 
had to come from the people by constitutional delegation: they could 
be created by simple political power.

Roosevelt also set the baneful precedent of using entitlement 
programs, such as Social Security, to buy some people's votes with 
other people's money. It was both a fatal corruption of democracy and 
the realization of the Servile State in America. The class of voting 
parasites has been swelling ever since.

So the New Deal didn't just expand the power of the federal 
government; that had been done before. The New Deal did much deeper 
mischief: it struck at the whole principle of constitutional 
resistance to federal expansion. Congress didn't need any 
constitutional amendment to increase its powers; it could increase 
its own powers ad hoc, at any time, by simple majority vote.

All this, of course, would have seemed monstrous to our ancestors. 
Even Alexander Hamilton, who favored a relatively strong central 
government in his time, never dreamed of a government so powerful.

The Court suffered a bloody defeat at Roosevelt's hands, and since 
his time it has never found a major act of Congress unconstitutional. 
This has allowed the power of the federal government to grow without 
restraint. At the federal level, "checks and balances" has ceased to 
include judicial review.

This is a startling fact, flying as it does in the face of the 
familiar conservative complaints about the Court's "activism." When 
it comes to Congress, the Court has been absolutely passive. As if to 
compensate for its habit of capitulation to Congress, the Court's 
post-World War II "activism" has been directed entirely against the 
states, whose laws it has struck down in areas that used to be 
considered their settled and exclusive provinces. Time after time, it 
has found "unconstitutional" laws whose legitimacy had stood 
unquestioned throughout the history of the Republic.

Notice how total the reversal of the Court's role has been. It began 
with the duty, according to Hamilton, of striking down new seizures 
of power by Congress. Now it finds constitutional virtually 
everything Congress chooses to do. The federal government has assumed 
myriads of new powers nowhere mentioned or implied in the 
Constitution, yet the Court has never seriously impeded this 
expansion, or rather explosion, of novel claims of power. What it 
finds unconstitutional are the traditional powers of the states.

The postwar Court has done pioneering work in one notable area: the 
separation of church and state. I said "pioneering," not 
praiseworthy. The Court has consistently imposed an understanding of 
the First Amendment that is not only exaggerated but unprecedented -- 
most notoriously in its 1962 ruling that prayer in public schools 
amounts to an "establishment of religion." This interpretation of the 
Establishment Clause has always been to the disadvantage of 
Christianity and of any law with roots in Christian morality. And 
it's impossible to doubt that the justices who voted for this 
interpretation were voting their predilections.

Maybe that's the point. I've never heard it put quite this way, but 
the Court's boldest rulings showed something less innocent than a 
series of honest mistakes. Studying these cases and others of the 
Court's liberal heyday, one never gets the sense that the majority 
was suppressing its own preferences; it was clearly enacting them. 
Those rulings can be described as wishful thinking run amok, and 
touched with more than a little arrogance. All in all, the Court 
displayed the opposite of the restrained and impartial temperament 
one expects even of a traffic-court judge, let alone a Supreme Court.

It's ironic to recall Hamilton's assurance that the Supreme Court 
would be "the least dangerous" of the three branches of the federal 
government. But Hamilton did give us a shrewd warning about what 
would happen if the Court were ever corrupted: in Federalist No. 78 
he wrote that "liberty can have nothing to fear from the judiciary 
alone, but would have everything to fear from its union with either 
of the other [branches]." Since Franklin Roosevelt, as I've said, the 
judiciary has in effect formed a union with the other two branches to 
aggrandize the power of the federal government at the expense of the 
states and the people.

This, in outline, is the constitutional history of the United States. 
You won't find it in the textbooks, which are required to be 
optimistic, to present degeneration as development, and to treat the 
successive pronouncements of the Supreme Court as so many oracular 
revelations of constitutional meaning. A leading liberal scholar, 
Leonard Levy, has gone so far as to say that what matters is not what 
the Constitution says, but what the Court has said about the 
Constitution in more than 400 volumes of commentary.

This can only mean that the commentary has displaced the original 
text, and that "We the People" have been supplanted by "We the 
Lawyers." We the People can't read and understand our own 
Constitution. We have to have it explained to us by the 
professionals. Moreover, if the Court enjoys oracular status, it 
can't really be criticized, because it can do no wrong. We may 
dislike its results, but future rulings will have to be derived from 
them as precedents, rather than from the text and logic of the 
Constitution. And notice that the "conservative" justices appointed 
by Republican presidents have by and large upheld not the original 
Constitution, but the most liberal interpretations of the Court 
itself -- notably on the subject of abortion, which I'll return to in 
a minute.



[END]

*     New 73 minute DVD just released which details CAFE's Battle for 
Freedom and Justice for Ernst Zundel. 
http://www.zundelsite.org/zundel_persecuted/video/index.html

*     Sample sketch of more than 100 drawings made by Ernst Zundel in 
prison.  Take a look at 
http://www.zundelsite.org/gallery/donations/index.html
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: logo.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 36377 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : /pipermail/attachments/20041122/b6024044/logo.jpg