Rossputin.com Rational Thinking About Our World

On this most important of American holidays, as we consider the liberty enshrined in our founding documents...the liberty that has made this country great...I urge all my readers to consider where that liberty has been going in recent years and how much worse it is likely to get in coming years unless we have something like another Reagan Revolution.

I think it's important to note that while liberals (and terrorists) think they're getting the best of it these days, that could turn on a dime and suddenly you could see liberals getting wrecked by the Court if conservative justices ever decided to act as politically as the liberals do. This, however, is somewhat less likely because conservative justices more frequently believe the Constitution means what it says.

The chief culprit in our steady loss of liberty is the Supreme Court, whose liberal justices have plainly decided to ignore what the Constitution says and instead to rule based on their preferred outcomes.

A great example comes from Justice Stephen Breyer's approach to the recently-decided Heller case in which a 5-4 majority ruled that the Second Amendment provides an individual right to gun ownership.

According to an AP article in which the left-leaning AP is trying to make Americans believe that the ruling will cause increased suicides in America,

The high court's majority opinion made no mention of suicide. But in a dissenting opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer used the word 14 times in voicing concern about the impact of striking down the handgun ban.

"If a resident has a handgun in the home that he can use for self-defense, then he has a handgun in the home that he can use to commit suicide or engage in acts of domestic violence," Breyer wrote.

The idea that our right to own a gun goes away because a judge dislikes one potential use of that gun is insane, and I mean that word literally, for a Supreme Court justice to accept.

If anything it would be the liberal judges who would most likely stand up for hate speech to be protected by the First Amendment, as it should be. Many people don't like that outcome and don't think people should be using their right to open their mouths in that way. Yet those same judges who would uphold that right would then deny the Second Amendment because they don't like the outcome of that right.

Such subjective and transient adherence to principle and the black-and-white words on the parchment represent a danger to our nation...not just a danger to conservative's goals.

Conservative judges get it wrong to, such as Justice Scalia's ridiculous agreement that the growing of marijuana for personal (and, in that case medicinal) use can be prevented by the federal government under the Commerce Clause. There's one example of a decision which was incorrect and which would be more likely to bother liberals than conservatives.

Of course, the Mother of All Court Errors was the 5-4 decision in the Kelo case, a case which should cause people of all political stripes except for government bureaucrats to scream. In that ruling, the Court decided that a locale can, through eminent domain power, take private property (in this case Suzette Kelo's home) and give it to another private owner whom they expect to pay more property tax. The Court did this by ruling that this so-called "public benefit" satisfied the Constitution's explicit requirement that property taken by eminent domain must be "for public use", as in a park, road, post office, etc. Conservatives must have wanted to severely beat Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the deciding vote along with the 4 liberal Justices. I know I did. Liberals must realize that this ruling is exceptionally dangerous for poor people because 1) they pay less property tax than others do, typically, and 2) they can't afford the best lawyers to defend them against such takings. This ruling will victimize far more poor people than rich people.

In all of these cases and quite a few more (such as giving habeas rights to terrorists), the Supreme Court majority has ruled based on the outcome they'd like to see rather than on what the Constitution clearly says...or doesn't say.

Not only are the decisions reprehensible in their own right, but they show this nation clearly walking down a path toward tyranny, away from the rule of law.

Liberals and conservatives alike should only support justices who swear to uphold the Constitution as it is written, not as they (or some Europeans) think it should have been written, and without regard to their personal views as to possible bad outcomes from ruling that people do indeed have rights. (To the extent that bad outcomes are to be addressed by government, it must be done in the legislature.)

If we continue to allow the Court to go down this path, on some July 4th in the not too distant future we will be wondering what happened to our Independence.

Unfortunately, I do not see anything changing, except for the worse, especially when our next President is a Democrat with a huge Democrat majority in the Senate. Our only hope is that someone Obama appoints will turn out to be the converse of David Souter, appointed by and assumed to be a conservative but who has turned out to be a reliably anti-Constitution vote on the Court.

So, on this July 4th, enjoy your Independence...while you still can.