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Loony Liberals Who Wear Black Robes

Thank You, 9th Circuit Court!

How nice. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has decided that our Pledge of Allegiance is unconstitutional. Schoolchildren in no fewer than nine Western states could be affected by this asinine decision from a pair of loony liberals who wear black robes and try to destroy American values on a regular basis.

Turn back the clock and pretend you're living in the United States nine months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Can you imagine what would happen if some judges decided that children would be harmed by reciting the Pledge during World War II? Do you think Americans would stand for it?

It's time to take an aggressively optimistic stand over things like this. Instead of beating our chests and banging our heads against the wall, we should remember a few things. First off, this ruling could very well be reversed. The Supreme Court has had to intervene and straighten out a mess left by this kooky bunch of San Francisco liberals on more than one occasion. Secondly, I really think that the average citizen is starting to finally get a fire lighted under his fanny over these kinds of anti-American occurrences.

Most of us aren't forgetting that we're in the middle of a war. And whether it's Peter Jennings and ABC-TV refusing to allow Toby Keith's patriotic song to be performed on their July Fourth special, or PBS-TV banning Charlie Daniels' musical tribute to the heroes of September 11, or this latest outrage coming from the 9th Circuit Court, we're starting to pay attention. We're keeping track. And we're taking names.

It's been a long time since we've been passionate about America. Our senses have been dulled by a liberal press, a vulgar Hollywood, a presidential cesspool, and a bunch of judges who thumb their noses at decent, hard-working, tax-paying, God-fearing Americans.

I really believe that we're headed for a showdown of epic proportions. We're going to wake up and vote out liberals like Tom Daschle and Hillary Clinton. We're going to go back to being a nation that is proud of its patriotism and refuses to be ashamed of its Christian foundation.

I think that instead of complaining about the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision, we should thank these pitiful judges. Thanks to them, the tide is turning. The previously silent majority will start to roar. And we're finally going to reclaim our great country again. The loony liberals have held it hostage long enough. God bless America.

Mike Gallagher. Mike Gallagher's radio talk show is heard daily all over the country, including Los Angeles, Dallas and Washington, D.C. Thank You, 9th Circuit Court! NewsMax. Thursday, June 27, 2002.

Tyranny In Black Robes

"... the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.

– Thomas Jefferson

It's about time that we all stood up and shouted, "We've had it, and we're not going to take it any more!" Right on the heels of a federal judge's order that, by virtue of a clause in the Constitution that does not happen to be in the Constitution but was sneaked into it by a Supreme Court justice back in the 1930s, a monument with the Ten Commandments inscribed on it must be removed from the Alabama state supreme court building, we have another two of these judicial tyrants stepping on our rights.

With the FCC's "Do Not Call" list about to go into effect and ban all those annoying telemarketers from besieging us, one federal judge declared that Congress didn't give the FCC the authority to enforce the list's prohibition against telephonic harassment of the 50 million Americans who signed up on the list and therefore it could not be enforced.

When Congress reacted with dizzying speed – which shows what they can do when they want to – by enacting legislation giving the agency the required authority and President Bush signed it into law, another federal judge steps up and says the list can't be enforced because it violates the telemarketers' free speech rights.

What we have here is another one of those cases where the will of the people, in this case expressed by 50 million of us, is simply ignored by federal judges who appear not to give a tinker's dam what the people who pay their salaries want and are entitled to.

In California at the moment there is a recall election in which one of the candidates, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is being castigated for having voted for Proposition 187, a 1994 initiative that banned educational and social services for undocumented immigrants.

Fully 60 percent of the voters cast their ballots in favor of that initiative – obviously a majority of California voters wanted to see that measure enforced. The stated purpose of the initiative was to "provide for cooperation between state and local government agencies, and to establish a system of required notification by and between such agencies, to prevent illegal aliens in the United States from receiving benefits or public services in the State of California."

Proposition 187's provisions require California law enforcement, social services, health care and public personnel to:

• Verify the immigration status of persons with whom they come in contact;
• Notify certain defined persons of their immigration status;
• Report those persons to state and federal officials; and
• Deny those persons social services, health care and education.

Too bad if the people of California didn't want to be saddled with the cost of paying benefits to people who had no right to be in the state or the nation in the first place. The federal courts promptly stepped in and for all intents and purposes killed the initiative.

As far back as 1997, Policy Review: The Journal of American Citizenship warned that "in case after case, federal judges are expressing contempt for democracy, overturning laws passed by state legislatures or adopted directly by the people through the initiative process. In recent years, federal judges have blocked the implementation of two California ballot initiatives, one that denies government services to illegal immigrants and one that bans racial and ethnic preferences. In Washington state and New York, federal judges have overturned state laws banning physician-assisted suicide. And the Supreme Court overturned a Colorado initiative to deny giving special legal preferences to homosexuals."

That same year, Phyllis Schlafly warned: "The federal judges appointed by Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are the biggest threat to constitutional self-government today. These activist judges have been writing liberal opinions into the law, usurping legislative functions, and depriving Americans of our rights of self-government."

Since then the record has been replete with cases of federal judges trampling over the rights of citizens, and not all of them were Clinton or Carter appointees. One example: the notorious 9th Circuit, where judges ruled that reciting the Pledge of Allegiance is prohibited because it contains the words "Under God." Moreover, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals let stand a federal district judge's decision to ban the saying of grace before meals at Virginia Military Institute.

According to David Limbaugh in his new book, "Persecution – How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity," in May 1995 U.S. District Judge Samuel B. Kent of the Southern District of Texas decreed that any student uttering the word "Jesus" would be arrested and tossed in the pokey for six months. I'm not kidding!

Said this black-robed tyrant: "And make no mistake, the court is going to have a United States marshal in attendance at the graduation. If any student offends this court, that student will be arrested and will face up to six months? incarceration in the Galveston County Jail for contempt of court. Anyone who thinks I'm kidding about this order better think again. ... Anyone who violates these orders, no kidding, is going to wish that he or she had died as a child when this court gets through with it."

Another extraordinary example of judicial absurdity was the case in which Harold Baer, the federal district judge in New York, suppressed more than $4 million worth of drugs seized as evidence by the New York City police. Baer claimed that the police lacked a "reasonable suspicion" that a crime was occurring, even though they observed four men at 5 a.m., in an area notorious for drug-dealing, load bags into the trunk of a car without speaking to its driver, and then run away after noticing the cops.

According to Baer, it was perfectly normal for them to flee from the police since "residents in this neighborhood tended to regard police officers as corrupt, abusive, and violent." Baer finally went sane and reversed himself after the outcry reached all the way to Washington.

According to the National Legal Foundation of Virginia Beach, Va., U.S. District Judge Ira DeMent of Alabama's Northern Division ordered DeKalb County school officials to take the following actions, all of which fly in the face of the rights and wishes of the people of Alabama:

• Prohibit invocations or benedictions at graduations – even if they were part of the student's speech.
• Punish any student who dares to utter such a prayer – even as it occurs.
• Not encourage students to attend baccalaureate services.
• Prohibit – even in a crisis situation – a devotional message over a public address system.
• Outlaw prayer at football games.
• Stop the Gideons and other groups from coming into classrooms to offer Bibles to students who might want them, and tell them that they cannot "harass" students on public sidewalks near the school.
• Give every principal a copy of the judge's injunction, post the injunction where all students and teachers can read it, and have copies of it available for checkout at every school library.
• Conduct mandatory training sessions for all faculty and administrators to familiarize them with the judge's injunction.
• Require faculty and administrators hired in future years to read all the materials from the training session.
• Check in with the judge four times a year and certify to him that they are still obeying his injunction.
• Pay for inspectors – Judge DeMent called them "monitors" – to come into schools and check for any illegal praying.

Wrote Kim Weissman last July: "Nevada voters voted (twice) that tax increases require a two-thirds legislative majority, and even amended their State constitution to that effect; but the Nevada Supreme Court simply set aside that constitutional provision, and ordered state legislators to violate the constitution they swore to uphold and raise taxes by a simple majority. "And the U.S. Supreme Court recently simply set aside a federal constitutional provision mandating equal protection of the laws, and invented a new constitutional right to diversity. Those examples represent a pattern of judicial arrogance that circumvents the will of the people and the constitutions by which even the courts are supposed to be bound, and says to the people of the nation, 'If you don't like it, too bad – there's nothing you can do about it.' "

I'm not so sure they're right. Congress can take the first steps to put a rein on the federal judiciary. They have the power to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts and they should be taking steps to see how far they can go in this direction. And do it pronto!

Moreover, Congress should enact a constitutional amendment declaring that there is nothing in the First Amendment that orders separation of church and state, and move to see to it that Americans' rights to the free exercise of religion, now under assault, will be protected.

As Kim Weissman did in his column last July, I'll let Thomas Jefferson have the final say here. In his own way he seemed do be asking us if we have had enough and if we are going to take it anymore:

To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. ... [T]heir power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided ... its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves. ... When the legislative or executive functionaries act unconstitutionally, they are responsible to the people in their elective capacity. The exemption of the judges from that is quite dangerous enough.

Further,

It has long been my opinion, and I have never shrunk from its expression ... that the germ of dissolution of our Federal Government is in the constitution of the Federal Judiciary – an irresponsible body ... working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief over the field of jurisdiction until all shall be usurped from the States and the government be consolidated into one. To this I am opposed.

Jefferson concluded,

But the Chief Justice says, 'There must be an ultimate arbiter somewhere.' True, there must; but does that prove it is either party? The ultimate arbiter is the people of the Union, assembled by their deputies in convention, at the call of Congress or of two-thirds of the States. Let them decide to which they mean to give an authority claimed by two of their organs." Perhaps it is time for the States – and the people – to reassert their authority 'in convention.'

Time indeed – let's roll!

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor & publisher of Wednesday on the Web and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee which won statehood for Alaska. He is also a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute and a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. Tyranny In Black Robes. . Thursday, Oct. 2, 2003.

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