The Case Against Mitt Romney: Paul Weyrich Lays the Foundation

Previous Posts:
- July 16 — The Case Against Mitt Romney: Series Introduction

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In his groundbreaking column, “History and the Judiciary,” carried in its entirety at UndergroundJournal.net, conservative icon Paul Weyrich explains how deep this country’s problems have become:

….. I have listened as a debate is occurring over the proper powers of the courts and the tendency of some Americans to cede to the advocates of unrestrained judicial power victories to which they are not entitled.

I am occasionally referred to as a “founder of the modern conservative movement.” Such an honor places upon me and others to whom such a description applies a special duty to warn our fellow citizens. Americans today are witnesses to the realization of the great fear of our Founding Fathers: the passing away of government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as President Abraham Lincoln stated, in the United States of America. With respect to the courts, we need a revival of the rule of law based upon the constitutional principles laid down by those who founded this nation.

….. Regardless of our votes, the defining judgments in our collective and personal destinies often are made by persons whom the American people have not elected to rule.

We gave judges their robes and gavels so that they might resolve specific disputes between specific plaintiffs and defendants. We never gave them authority to issue commands to our elected lawmakers, forcing us down roads which we have not chosen to travel.

Judges have no constitutional authority to make laws or to amend our national and state constitutions. They have no authority to redefine words and concepts in our laws to mean what they and their ideological partisans wish for them to mean.

To Americans of previous generations this was obvious and fundamental. But for many in America today, this is meaningless, a mere technicality: judges are supreme because, well, because they just are.

When several judges opined that there ought to be no more prayer in American schools, lawyers, politicians and journalists told us that after three centuries of prayer in our schools, judges had suddenly “outlawed” it. Court opinions interpreting law and social custom magically became the law itself.

….. Likewise, judges ….. opined that the American people may neither protect children from violent murder in their mother’s womb, nor outlaw sodomy, nor restrict their civic blessing upon marriage to nature’s definition of it …..

….. Many of us received in shock and sadness the Goodridge v. the Department of Public Health of Massachusetts opinion on homosexual marriage. Why do self-styled “conservatives,” lawyers, politician and pundits among them, spread the assertion that judges have powers that the American people have never given them?

The truth is that the ruthlessly enforced illusion of judicial supremacy did not merely empower judges and disenfranchise the American people. It made journalists, lawyers and clever politicians more influential culturally. Most, after all, are of the same ideological bent as many judges.

And those who were not, the “conservatives,” played within the new rules: judges’ opinions are “the law” in the United States of America.

….. Not a single signer of the Constitution (or of the Declaration of Independence) would have taken seriously the purportedly “conservative” view today that to restrain judges we need to replace them through attrition over decades.

….. For the sake of this republic I urge my friends, fellow leaders and Americans to emphatically repudiate the devastating myth that judges have the power to make and redefine our laws.

….. In the last century cultural elites created an illusion of judicial power that would be unrecognizable to earlier Americans, lawyers and laymen.

….. I fear the conservative elites are putting the final nail in our coffin. I know these men. They mean well. They are not pursuing their view out of malice. They believe what they are doing is right. ….. I look at results, and it seems to me that proponents of the status quo are allowing the legal profession and the courts to impose moral and civil codes which cannot pass federal and state legislatures.

They foolishly are handing absolute power to anti-Judeo-Christian, anti-family ideologues.

Weyrich’s column, written after lifetime of conservatism, is a tacit acknowledgment that much of conservatism has been misdirected for decades.

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July 24, 11PM Note: This next paragraph replaces a muddier one that was previously posted.

Those of us who believe in the constitution and the rule of law must fiercely fight to roll back the poisonous notion of judicial supremacy. We must forcefully argue our points in the public square without compromise; elect those who share and will advance our sentiments; remove from office those who don’t, or won’t; and expose and marginalize those, including so-called conservative movement leaders, talkers, commentators, and lawyers, who don’t or won’t advance our cause. The notion of judicial supremacy is completely contrary to the Constitution Our Founders wrote, and to what they intended.

The executive and legislative two branches, as well as other courts, are not required to, and indeed MUST NOT obey court opinions if they believe that a court’s opinion violates the plain-English meaning of a state or the federal constitution (or legislature-passed statutes consistent with a state or the federal constitution).

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While he was governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, with the help of the supposed “elites” of conservatism who should have known better, did more to support and cement the “devastating myth” of judicial supremacy Weyrich refers to than any single man in America. What Romney did has had profound consequences already, and promises worse. His selection to the vice presidency by John McCain would gravely worsen the situation; Romney’s ascension to the presidency threatens to make surrender of the executive and legislative functions to the judiciary permanent.

More on that is coming tomorrow.