Supreme Court Appointments

[HoneyBadger]

So essentially, in civics 101, I was fed a line of BS about checks and balances, etc? Makes sense. :/

What, then, is the reality? Did we just skate by on a general moral society until it degraded enough for the chinks in the systemic armor to give way?

That is my general impression, but foxtrot is significantly more qualified to write about it than I am.

[Rumline]

The heart of liberty is in fact the exact opposite, as liberty is the ability to do what is right. Freedom is inability to be coerced into doing the wrong thing.

Uhh what? Liberty and freedom, in their purest sense, is the ability to do whatever you want without restraint. Morality doesn't play into "freedom" at all. In fact morality can be considered a restriction on freedom. It may be a set of restrictions that society generally approves of, but it is still a restriction.

"Conviction" is the inability to be coerced into doing the wrong thing.

[CS1983]

Uhh what? Liberty and freedom, in their purest sense, is the ability to do whatever you want without restraint. Morality doesn't play into "freedom" at all. In fact morality can be considered a restriction on freedom. It may be a set of restrictions that society generally approves of, but it is still a restriction.

"Conviction" is the inability to be coerced into doing the wrong thing.

Conviction is a belief in something which is unshakeable. It can and often does inform your free will to do or not do this or that thing based on aforementioned unshakeable belief -- but it is not an infallible backstop of the opposite action. For example, you can have a "conviction" that it's absolutely wrong to murder someone, but still be coerced (or even choose freely) into doing so in fear for your own life or that of another, or simply because you choose to despite the belief. That you have a conviction in the wrongness of murder doesn't per se demand you won't commit it.
RE: freedom, liberty and license...

True freedom, the freedom that liberates, is grounded in truth and ordered to truth and, therefore, to virtue. A free person is enslaved neither to the sheer will of another nor to his own appetites and passions. A free person lives uprightly, fulfilling his obligations to family, community, nation and God. By contrast, a person given over to his appetites and passions, a person who scoffs at truth and chooses to live, whether openly or secretly, in defiance of the moral law is not free. He is simply a different kind of slave.
The counterfeit of freedom consists in the idea of personal and communal liberation from morality, responsibility and truth. It is what our nation’s founders expressly distinguished from liberty and condemned as “license.” The so-called freedom celebrated today by so many of our opinion-shaping elites in education, entertainment and the media is simply the license to do whatever one pleases. This false conception of freedom – false because disordered, disordered because detached from moral truth and civic responsibility – shackles those in its grip no less powerfully than did the chattel slavery of old. Enslavement to one’s own appetites and passions is no less brutal a form of bondage for being a slavery of the soul. It is no less tragic, indeed, it is in certain respects immeasurably more tragic, for being self-imposed. It is ironic, is it not, that people who celebrate slavery to appetite and passion call this bondage “freedom”?

Robert P George in Address to Hillsdale College.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/965223/posts

In his famous work, "Orthodoxy", GK Chesterton said "Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.”

Is it any wonder then that the "artists" of today often come up with the most grotesque crap in an imitation of a life without limits? Enslaved, then, to nothing but ugliness and the whims of their passions, appetites, and stunted minds, they cannot produce beauty. An artist who works within the limits of his medium is restricted in an abstract sense, but by ignoring such boundaries is restricted entirely from his art. Similarly, we who are necessarily moral creatures, having a free will, are restricted more by vice than virtue. "Pure freedom" or an absolute ability to do whatever one wants is not only not freedom, it's impossible and absurd.

[CS1983]

There is no teeth behind "checks and balances". The country survived perhaps as long as it has on a concept of respect alone.

If a jurist steps out of line and ignores the constitution for sake of personal or political bias, what do they risk?

Judicial:
They can even wholeheartedly ignore such threshold requirements to liberty as due process. The only thing they risk is their law license and only in the most extreme of circumstances, and tbh, that never happens. People have been held for years without hearing, even committed suicide over it. What is the ramification? Nothing. Judges also have absolute immunity. They can order someone to come to your house and beat the shit out of you. They can order that you secretly be sterilized without you given any notice or hearing. And they suffer - no consequence. (Those are all very real examples). Here in Colorado for instance, I have yet to see a judge that understands that due process requires a person have a hearing prior to stealing their property (or shortly thereafter in exigent circumstances). It's plain language in the court rules (C.R.C.P. 104/404) it's long standing, well known, cited a billion times precidence (Fuentes v. Shevin 407 U.S. 67 (1972), Colorado even says they lack jurisdiction (Metro Nat'l Bank v. District Court (Co Supreme Court, can't remember citation from memory). But, they lack constitutional education and when the state steals property without hearing, they suffer no ramification - State is immune, Justice is immune, regulation won't investigate/harm them, so why give a fuck?

To give you a quick example off the top of my head of earlier constitutional rewrites: In re Ayers, 123 U.S. 443 (1887) summing up prior decisions re-writing the 11th amendment for us dating pre-civil war. (Re-writing it to make states totally immune) There are many others out there but I don't want to spend the time to dig them out, tbh.

Executive:
Executive can legislate (executive orders), and can inflict their bias into the judicial ("E.G. If I had a son, he would have looked like..."). They politicize judicial appointments, and now use the "justice department" as a weapon to "order" investigations. What is the ramification, what is the risk they have for stepping outside of their branch? Nothing. There never has been.

Legislative:
The few checks and balances that do exist tend to exist here, but without the garbage collection it is a horrifically flawed system that has led to the "we need to pass it to see what's in these 5,000 pages" that we have now. There is no one person in American that can understand and memorize even 5% of our legislation, laws, and regulation at any given time. Effectively making everyone a lawbreaker, which has provided the government with immense power. This isn't due to corruption now, it's due to the fact there is no motivation to clean out the books, there is no motivation to streamline anything; it's a flaw in our inception. It was manageable 100 years ago, but doomed to fail.

Basically, without garbage collection and teeth, our country has ran as long as it has on a principle of respect. The executive in generations past had enough respect not to legislate through executive orders, and feared old-time repercussions of bad press and election results. The judicial in generations past had a small reverence towards the constitution, even as they slowly eroded it by convenience. That reverence is gone across the board.

The problem with checks and balances is unless they are provided real teeth... It's about as effective as repeatedly telling a three year old "no" from a great distance where the kid knows you're not permitted to do anything. Good luck!

Fascinating, though terrifying. Thanks for the reply.

[davsel]

I can point to precedence dating back well into the early 1800's, potentially even the late 1700's, radically re-interpreting the clear language of constitutional amendments. This isn't any new thing. Contrary to our American indoctrination, upon our founding our country lacked a lot of necessary mechanisms to ensure the survival of liberty. They did well, for the time period, but unfortunately we never gave ourselves the room to make it better. Our checks and balances were almost non-existent from the beginning, especially upon the judicial.

1) A garbage management system was never created, nothing was made to ensure the efficiency of government. The problem with governments as each cycle waxes and wanes, the elected and appointed add more bureaucratic crap and legislation (that's what they are elected to do, right?) but nobody ever cleans anything out. Code has been inflating from the inception of our country faster than a fresh dead whale.

2) REAL checks and balances were never instituted. Judicial appointments afford no check nor balance upon that entire branch of our government. It permits judges to be politicized, and from the inception, made the judiciary start legislating from the bench without any risk of repercussion. There is, plain and simple, no motivation to strictly interpret the constitution and there never has been from inception.
(A real check and balance would have been providing a citizen - managed initiative that has the ability to initiate action to quickly terminate any judiciary with brutal efficiency (or any other state or federal employee) whom deviates from the constitution, with capital treason being available in certain situations) -- Then people STOP infecting their own bias into the system, and START paying attention to what the plain language is even if they disagree with it. If society needs change, they amend the constitution.

There are many others I can add to this list.

Make no mistake friends, despite what we'd like to believe this country was founded quite imperfectly, and it dooms us within the next generation or two. It was born with a terminal illness, and the unchecked abuses go back to within just a few decades of founding.

Quotes of the Founding Fathers
The Importance of a Moral Society

John Adams in a speech to the military in 1798 warned his fellow countrymen stating, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." John Adams is a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights and our second President.

[Zundfolge]

And that's the real point. The less moral society becomes the worse government gets.


"Hell is other people."
-Jean-Paul Sartre

[Teufelhund]

There is no teeth behind "checks and balances". The country survived perhaps as long as it has on a concept of respect alone.

...

Basically, without garbage collection and teeth, our country has ran as long as it has on a principle of respect. The executive in generations past had enough respect not to legislate through executive orders, and feared old-time repercussions of bad press and election results. The judicial in generations past had a small reverence towards the constitution, even as they slowly eroded it by convenience. That reverence is gone across the board.

The problem with checks and balances is unless they are provided real teeth... It's about as effective as repeatedly telling a three year old "no" from a great distance where the kid knows you're not permitted to do anything. Good luck!

I've been saying something to this effect to my friends and family for a while now, though I'm not nearly as well-versed as you evidently are.

It is at least refreshing to hear someone else type out eloquently my impression of the deepest problems in our system. I'd really like to hear what you think adequate "teeth" would be; I can't think of any mechanism that would be reliable, expedient, and incorruptible.

[Teufelhund]

Sounds great. You have my vote, sir.

I especially like this part:

... largely eliminate attorneys...

I'm sure they're not all terrible people, but as they are the root of the intentionally esoteric judiciary process to which we are all subject, I think they are the root cause of its perpetuated failure.

[cstone]

Anything involving human beings is already corrupt.

Without respect there cannot be agreement. Without agreement there is no consensus. All organized society is either based on the consent of the governed or fear of force.

[Great-Kazoo]

Anything involving human beings is already corrupt.

Without respect there cannot be agreement. Without agreement there is no consensus. All organized society is either based on the consent of the governed or fear of force.