PROGRESSIVE GAME PLAN: NEUTRALIZE THE SUPREME COURT AND DISARM THE CITIZENRY

The recent scurrilous attack on Associate Justice Clarence Thomas is part and parcel of the Political “Progressives”* attempt to neutralize the independence of the Third Branch of Government, the Judiciary, and its most ardent supporter of an armed citizenry.

On April 9, 2021, two years ago to this day of posting this article on the Arbalest Quarrel, Joe Biden issued an executive order, forming the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, “to examine the Court’s role in the Constitutional system; the length of service and turnover of justices on the Court; the membership and size of the Court; and the Court’s case selection, rules, and practices.”

The key phrase in this executive order is “the Court’s role in the Constitutional system.”

The Commission’s purpose may seem benign. It is anything but benign. Almost a hundred and thirty years earlier, Franklin D. Roosevelt attempted the same thing. Both sought to sideline and neutralize the U.S. Supreme Court.

Fortunately, for the Nation, the efforts of Roosevelt and Biden came to naught.

But the Biden Administration’s Progressive Globalist agenda is more extravagant and elaborate than anything dreamed up by Roosevelt and the fabricators of the “New Deal.”

The Progressives’ goal of a neo-feudalistic global empire requires neutralizing the High Court and erasing America’s armed citizenry.

The U.S. Supreme Court remains the only Branch of the Federal Government today that recognizes the importance of an armed citizenry to resist tyranny.

In three seminal case law decisions—Heller, McDonald, and Bruen—coming down in the last fifteen years, the conservative wing majority, led by Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and the late Justice Antonin Scalia, made patently clear the right to armed self-defense is an individual right and a natural law right, the core of which Government is forbidden to interfere with.

But these decisions are at loggerheads with the Progressives’ desire to neuter the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

In a report on “progressivism,’ published on July 18, 2007, the Heritage Foundation has described the nature of and the aims of the political, social, and cultural transformation of the Nation, using the word, ‘Revolution,’ to describe it.

Progressives have since made substantial strides in undermining the Constitution and transforming America beyond all recognition.

But use of the word, ‘Revolution,’ to describe this transformation is inaccurate. Rather, this extraordinary and extensive push to remake American society, is not properly a Revolution because we had our Revolution—the American Revolution of 1776—when America’s first Patriots defeated the British empire.

These Patriots constructed a free Constitutional Republic, unlike anything the world has seen before or since.

Having thrown off the yoke of tyranny, the framers of the U.S. Constitution, created a true Republican form of Government.

This “Federal” Government is one with limited and carefully delineated powers and authority. And those powers and authority are demarcated among three co-equal Branches.

The Government comes to be not by Divine Right nor by Right claimed for itself by itself. Rather, it comes into existence only by grace of the American people, who are and remain sole sovereign.

Since the people themselves created the Government, they retain the right to dismantle it when that Government serves its interests to the detriment of the people, devolving into tyranny.

The natural law right to armed self-defense, a right that shall not be infringed, is the instrument of last resort through which the American people maintain and retain both the legal and moral right to resist tyranny that Progressives impose on Americans. See AQ article, posted on October 1, 2021.

Progressivism is a thing openly hostile to and antithetical to the tenets and precepts of Individualism upon which the U.S. Constitution rests. See, e.g., article AQ article, posted on October 6, 2018.

Adherents of this political and social ideology perceive Government as sovereign over the people, turning the Constitution on its head.

Progressivism is an evil perpetrated on the American people, coming into being without the consent of the governed. It seeks a Globalist “Counterrevolution” in counterpoise to the morally good and successful “American Revolution.” See AQ article posted on October 26, 2020.

It is in this that the arrogant and ludicrous attack on Justice Thomas comes plainly into view.

Representative Ocasio-Cortez, a Progressive Democrat, has recently brought up the subject of impeachment against Clarence Thomas pertaining to “luxury trips and outings on yachts and private jets owned by Dallas businessman Harlan Crow, according to an investigation by ProPublica . . . .” See the article published in thehill.com.

She adds, in her typical hyperbolic, rhetorical fashion,

“‘Barring some dramatic change, this is what the Roberts court will be known for: rank corruption, erosion of democracy, and the stripping of human rights.’” Id.

Impeachment of a sitting Justice does fall within the purview of Congressional authority, but it is impractical and almost unheard of in the annals of history.

The House of Representatives impeached Associate Justice Samuel Chase, in 1804. He was acquitted by the U.S. Senate in 1805 and served on the High Court until his death in 1811. Another Associate Justice, Abe Fortas, resigned under threat of impeachment, in 1969. See the article posted in history.com.

Impeaching Justice Thomas in a Republican-controlled House won’t happen.

Progressives try a different tack.

“Sixteen lawmakers led by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., sent a letter to Roberts on Friday requesting an investigation into ‘allegations of unethical, and potentially unlawful, conduct.’” See the article in Foxnews.com.

Asking the Chief Justice to launch an investigation of his brethren is pompous, absurd, lame, and bogus.

Roberts will do no such thing. And this will rankle Progressives.

The Third Branch of Government remains constantly, aggravatingly, tantalizingly beyond the ability of Progressives to tamper with.

Unable at present to sit more mannequins like Ketanji Brown Jackson on the Court, they continue to probe for weaknesses. As a last resort, these Democrat Progressives challenge the Court’s importance, independence, and role.

Progressives employ like-minded attorneys to undercut the authority of the High Court.

One such attorney is Barry P. McDonald, Law Professor at Pepperdine University. In an essay, posted on The New York Times, on May 26, 2016, McDonald writes,

“The Supreme Court today is both political and powerful in ways that would be unrecognizable to the framers of the Constitution. They penned a mere five sentences creating a ‘supreme Court’ and defining its jurisdiction. The judicial branch was something of an afterthought for them, because they believed that in a democracy the elected branches would be responsible for governing the country.

Judicial review, in its modern sense, did not exist. As the framers envisioned it, the justices appointed to the Supreme Court would mainly interpret and apply federal law when necessary to resolve disputes involving the rights of individuals. And though the framers’ views on the court’s role in interpreting and enforcing the Constitution are the subject of debate, it seems most likely that when disputes required determining whether a federal law comported with the Constitution, the court’s interpretation was supposed to bind only the parties in the particular case — not the legislative and executive branches generally.

Over time, however, and especially from the mid-20th century on, the court’s vision of its role in our democratic system changed, from dispute resolver to supreme arbiter of all matters of constitutional law, so that elected branches of government at federal and state levels were bound to accept its interpretations. The American people largely went along with this accretion of power. But they surely never anticipated that eventually, many politically charged and contestable questions — for example, whether the Constitution guarantees the right to possess guns, to have an abortion, to allow gay couples to marry, or to allow corporations to spend money to help elect our political representatives — would be decided by one unelected justice who straddled political voting blocs on the court.

This is democratic folly.”

And, in a follow-up article posted in the Times, on October 11, 2018, Barry McDonald, writes,

“When the founders established our system of self-government, they didn’t expend much effort on the judicial branch. Of the roughly three and a half long pieces of inscribed parchment that make up the Constitution, the first two pages are devoted to designing Congress. Most of the next full page focuses on the president. The final three-quarters of a page contains various provisions, including just five sentences establishing a ‘supreme court,’ any optional lower courts Congress might create and the types of cases those courts could hear.”

McDonald claims the founders relegated the U.S. Supreme Court to a subservient role in our Three-Branch Governmental structure.

This is not only an uncommon viewpoint among scholars, and legally odd; it is demonstrably false.

In the Federalist Papers Alexander Hamilton made patently clear that, on matters of Constitutional authority, the Legislative Branch must yield to the Judiciary.

“No legislative act . . . contrary to the Constitution can be valid.  To deny this would be to affirm that . . . men acting by virtue of powers may do not only what their powers do not authorize, but what they forbid.  If it be said that the legislative body are themselves the constitutional judges of their own powers, and that the construction they put upon them is conclusive upon the other departments, it may be answered, that this cannot be the natural presumption, where it is not to be collected from any particular provisions of the Constitution. . . . . It is more rational to suppose that the courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority. The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts.”– Excerpt from Federalist Paper No. 78, written by Alexander Hamilton and published in 1788, part of the founding era’s most important documents explaining to the people the nature of the Constitution then under consideration for ratification. See the article in constitutionalcenter.org. The article also cites to one of the Barry McDonald articles for comparison and contrast.

Hamilton’s essay in Federalist Paper No. 78 is an outright repudiation of  McDonald’s remarks about the U.S. Supreme Court. See citations, supra.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice, John Marshall was certainly aware of Alexander Hamilton’s remarks in the Federalist, when he drafted his opinion in Marbury vs. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803). The case is a mainstay of Constitutional Law, taught to first-year law students and one of the most important cases in American jurisprudence.

The case lays out clearly and categorically the vital role played by the U.S. Supreme Court in our Three-Branch Federal Governmental system.

In no uncertain terms, John Marshall, made definitely and definitively clear that it is for the Judiciary, not the Legislature, to determine the constitutionality of Congressional Statutes. We cite below a portion of  Justice Marshall’s erudite opinion.

“If an act of the legislature, repugnant to the constitution, is void, does it, notwithstanding its invalidity, bind the courts, and oblige them to give it effect? Or, in other words, though it be not law, does it constitute a rule as operative as if it was a law? This would be to overthrow in fact what was established in theory; and would seem, at first view, an absurdity too gross to be insisted on. It shall, however, receive a more attentive consideration.

It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is. Those who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule. If two laws conflict with each other, the courts must decide on the operation of each.

The judicial power of the United States is extended to all cases arising under the constitution.

Could it be the intention of those who gave this power, to say that, in using it, the constitution should not be looked into? That a case arising under the constitution should be decided without examining the instrument under which it arises?

This is too extravagant to be maintained.”

Progressives pretend the U.S. Constitution is capable of shapeshifting. It isn’t.

That doesn’t bother them, though, because they intend to eliminate the Constitution. Referring to it now, as they must, just to destroy it, and creating something novel, more to their liking—a thing subordinated to international law or edict, and subject to change as whim or chance dictates—that’s what they they have in mind.

In the interim, they force it to cohere to their precepts, agenda, and goals, all of which are antithetical and anathema to the Constitution, as written.

In the naked attempt to knead the Constitution as if it were a lump of clay, they show their hand.

Trivializing the role of the Court because they can’t easily control it and going after a U.S. Supreme Court Justice they don’t like because he defends a natural law right they don’t agree with, Progressives proclaim to all the world their shameless contempt for Nation, Culture, History, Heritage, Constitution, Ethos, Ethic, and People.

They dare disparage us. Yet, it is we, true American Patriots, who rightfully ought to visit derision on them.

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*The expression ‘Progressive’ as with the expression, ‘Liberal,’ (less so with the expressions, ‘Marxist,’ ‘Neo-Marxist,’ or ‘Classical Marxist’) do not have precise and rigid definitions, due in part, perhaps, to the ubiquity and popularity of the first two terms in the Democratic Party vernacular.

Most Democrats, it is here presumed, prefer use of ‘liberal’ as applied to them. And some no doubt prefer the term ‘Progressive,’ as an acknowledged more extreme version of ‘Liberal,’ and they take the label as a note of pride. See article on the website, thisnation.com.

But most, if not all, Democrats avoid the appellation ‘Marxist,’ at least publicly, even if that label is most in line with their ideological beliefs, social, political, and economic, and demonstrated in their actions. They might use that expression amongst themselves even if they dare not refer to themselves as ‘Marxist’ in public and would deny the description vehemently if the label is thrust on them by an outsider. For this article, we are staying with the expression, ‘Progressive,’ as it aligns most closely with the theme of the article and apropos of references made in it.

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Copyright © 2023 Roger J Katz (Towne Criour), Stephen L. D’Andrilli (Publius) All Rights Reserved.