Supreme Ideology

There have been three major decisions handed down by the Supreme Court of the United States in the past few weeks, and I wanted to devote a little bit of time to them today. The point of this is about how the Supreme Court, whose job it is to interpret the Constitution and make sure that the laws of the land, and the actions of the Federal Government do not violate the Constitution, not to make rules and decide how things should be. This is the one position where it should not matter what a persons political views happen to be, because they are upholding the intent of the authors of the Constitution, or the amendments to it, not to make their own rules.

The first decision, which was terrible, was to extend certain Constitutional rights to Terrorists held at Gitmo. There was no basis for this decision whatsoever. At no point in our history have we taken people who were captured on the field of battle, who are enemies of our nation, and were engaged in acts against us, and charged them in a civilian court, and bestowed the protections of our Constitution upon them. They do not stand accused of crimes, nor were the arrested by police officers. They are, for all intents and purposes, Prisoners of War, or a sort, being that, as terrorists, they are not wearing the uniform of any nation, but that is the closest parallel that we have for how these people should be treated. There are many arguments for and against detaining people like this over a long period of time, and I understand that, but the Court's role in this case was to determine what the Constitution intends in such a case, and clearly, the Constitution does not allow for enemy's who are captured on the battle field to be granted rights of protection, which are supposed to be reserved for Citizens of the USA.

The second decision, which is different, but in it's way even more reprehensible than the first, was to say that the death penalty cannot be used in cases of Child Rape. The argument that the majority used in the outrageous ruling was that the death penalty in these cases would violate the protection against cruel and unusual punishment. This is one of the most ridiculous arguments that they could have used. This protection was not meant to strike down the death penalty for heinous crimes, it was to prevent the torture of citizens by the Government or ruling body. So that things like the rack, or thumb screws, or whipping and things like that could not be used as penalties in the USA. Nor does it reserve Capital Punishment for murderers. You could argue against it for shoplifting, or something like that, but, nobody is suggesting that in any case. The fact is that the rape, and/or sexual assault of a child is sufficiently heinous to warrant the death penalty. Certainly it does not stand to reason that putting someone to death for this crime would be cruel or unusual punishment. It's just nuts. There are many reasons why child rapists should be put to death, but again, that is not up to the court, what they should have been concerned with is the intention of that clause in the Constitution (Bill of Rights actually, but that's still part of the Constitution) which clearly did not apply to this case. This is crazy.

The third one, which was a good decision, was to strike down as Unconstitutional the Washington DC gun ban. This was true. For far too long we have been dealing with horribly unreasonable gun laws, which serve to do nothing more than keep guns out of the hands of law abiding citizens who would only use them for self defence in any case, but did nothing to keep them away from criminals, making the world a much more dangerous place. Clearly the Constitution intended for the right to keep and bear arms to be a right for individual persons, not for just the military. I think the wording of the amendment, while perfectly clear to those who wrote it, has become unfortunate for today, since, being that the culture is different today, the intent is not nearly so clear to people today. Thankfully this time they sided with USA, and not with the liberal ideology that drives so much of what happens in this country.

The main point that I want to make is this, when the Supreme Court runs away, unchecked and makes any ruling that it wants, we loose our liberty, and our freedoms, and move from the Constitutional Republic that we were formed to be, and become and Judicial Oligarchy (that is, rule by an elite few), and no good can possibly come from that.