'It's time to
tell the judiciary to go to hell', Author reveals recipe for fixing federal courts without
constitutional amendment, by Paul Bremmer, 8/13/16, WND
Are you a conservative
worried about losing the federal courts if Hillary Clinton is elected
president? Don’t waste your tears at this point, says Conservative Review
senior editor Daniel Horowitz, the courts are already gone. “This is like a
wind-up toy: every four years, Republicans dangle in front of us, ‘Hey, you
gotta vote for us, otherwise we’ll lose the courts,'” Horowitz said during a
recent appearance on The
Tom Roten Morning Show. “I’m
here to tell you we’ve lost the courts. They’re gone, gone, gone. We do need a
Republican Congress and administration, but for the purposes of stripping the
courts of that power, giving it back to Congress and the state legislatures.”
Horowitz pointed out
things have gotten so bad conservatives couldn’t even get a simple voter ID law
past the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, regarded as one of the least liberal
circuits. Ten of the 15 judges on the Fifth Circuit were appointed by
Republican presidents. However, only four of the 13 circuit courts in the
country currently have a majority of Republican appointees sitting on the
bench.
Many conservatives
believe all they need to do is elect a Republican president who will appoint
conservative judges to the federal courts, but Horowitz noted it would take
many consecutive years of Republican presidents hitting the mark on their
judicial appointments to finally turn the courts in a more conservative direction.
By that point, it may be
too late. Horowitz noted the courts have been moving quickly in recent years:
they have mandated states fund Planned Parenthood, mangled state religious
liberty laws, made transgender people a protected class, forced states to give
birth certificates to illegal aliens and tossed out basic voter integrity laws.
This all adds up to what
Horowitz terms “societal transformation without representation,” which is the
thesis of his new book “Stolen
Sovereignty: How to Stop Unelected Judges From Transforming America.”
Horowitz said the late
Justice Antonin Scalia was correct when he predicted the theory of a “living
Constitution” would destroy the country and the federal courts. In Horowitz’s
view, when judges usurp power that doesn’t belong to them and they believe in a
“living Constitution,” it creates a toxic mixture.
“It would be bad enough
if they had that power and they, in good faith, attempted to interpret the
Constitution as originally adopted,” Horowitz said. “But … it’s worse than
that. We’ve given them the power of the sole and final arbiter, but at the same
time, they believe the Constitution is unconstitutional. What’s in it is taken
out, what’s out is put in.”
He noted the practice of
early voting was not widespread until recently, yet the Fourth U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals just overturned North Carolina’s attempt to shorten the early
voting period, claiming the state intended to discriminate against racial
minorities. The court also tossed out North Carolina’s voter ID law and laws
limiting same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting and preregistration
“They basically say that any method or procedure that the Democrats concoct
that will indicate there’ll be more black turnout, you have to adopt it, and if
you don’t they’ll force it,” Horowitz explained.
So not only are the
courts becoming the sole and final arbiter of most important policy questions,
thereby rendering elections moot, but they are preventing Republicans from
winning elections by forcing states to adopt election laws that naturally favor
Democrats.
“This is worse than King
George!” Horowitz exclaimed. “He didn’t have this power – I mean, he didn’t get
involved in the methods and procedures of elections for the colonial
legislatures at all. They were fighting taxation without representation; we’re
fighting social transformation without representation.”
Horowitz said the
circuit court’s rulings on North Carolina’s election laws are emblematic of a
larger problem – federal courts are crushing the states, essentially forbidding
them from governing themselves.
“At some point the
states have got to just say ‘No,'” he insisted. “See, we’re winning in the
states. We have 32 governors, we control the trifecta of governance, two
branches of the legislature and a governor, in 24 states. We have the potential
to even grow from there. But we don’t benefit from it because the feds are
crushing us.”
Horowitz said state
legislatures have become a joke, with liberal special interest groups able to
vault over their heads with help from the federal courts. “We need to return
state legislatures to the power they had at the founding, the power they were
supposed to have, and it at least starts with getting the unelected branch of
the federal government out of our hair,” he said. “It’s time to tell the
judiciary to go to hell.”
In order to do that, we
don’t need a constitutional amendment, according to Horowitz. In fact, the idea
that conservatives are the ones who need to change the Constitution is
completely wrongheaded. “Why should we have to amend it?” Horowitz asked. “[The
courts] are the ones illegally amending it.”
He said the answer
already lies in the Constitution – Article III, Section 2 to be exact. That
section allows Congress to restrict the jurisdiction of the federal courts. So
rather than a Republican president or a constitutional amendment, a
congressional statute is all that’s necessary to put the brakes on judicial
tyranny.
“I’m not saying not to
vote for Trump, I’m not saying it’s not important to appoint better judges, but
we don’t need a Republican president to merely appoint better judges,” the
author said. “We need a Republican president to sign legislation stripping the
courts of this power they don’t have to begin with.”
Horowitz ended with a
call to action: “We don’t have to sit and take this social transformation
anymore. This is our country, this is our Constitution; they have no right to change
it, and let’s go back to our first roots, our first principles. Let’s take back
our country from the unelected judges.”
http://www.wnd.com/2016/08/its-time-to-tell-the-judiciary-to-go-to-hell/
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