(This blog is far too long, but I am
publishing it because of many requests)
In just
over five hundred hours from now, the people of the United States will be
stepping behind the curtain to vote for President of the United States.
I have to
say that this is the … the strangest election in my life time.
It really
is unusual. Driving over here from Harbor Springs, I saw a bumper sticker….
with no name on it.
Just a box
with an “X” in it. Then, in red letters,
it said “NONE OF THE ABOVE”
It really
is the strangest election in my lifetime, and I have to tell you that I am a
very, very old man.
I was
curled up on my mother’s womb in 1928 when Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith.
It was the
only time my father ever voted for a Democrat. Of course, he denied it. He said
he didn’t vote for a Democrat. He said he voted for a Catholic.
I got my
first experience in grass roots politics in 1936. It was literally grass roots.
I wrestled a kid in my neighborhood on the front lawn. He was for Franklin
Delano Roosevelt and I was for Alf Landon.
That was a
very long time ago. There was no television, there were no computers, no Face
Book. My grandmother’s canary was the only thing that tweeted. The Supreme
Court was still trying to protect the Constitution from the New Deal.
Too bad Alf
Landon didn’t win. The first thing Roosevelt did in 1937 was to try to pack the
Supreme Court with six new justices. Congress defeated the Judiciary Reorganization
Bill of 1937, but it wasn’t long before FDR was able to make his first Supreme
Court appointment.
He said he
wanted a “thumping evangelical New Dealer” and he found one in Hugo Black, a Senator from Alabama.
Over the
next twelve years, Roosevelt appointed seven more thumping, evangelical New
Deal Judges, and the Supreme Court was magically and permanently converted into
a political arm of the White House.
Today, we
have Justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg who presided over a gay wedding while
the court was still hearing the debates about gay marriage and who openly
declared her partisanship in the presidential election.
For more
than seventy-five years, the Supreme Court of the United States has usurped the
sovereignty of the American people by inventing what they call “constitutional
law.” to advance their political agenda.
There are
only two problems with ‘constitutional law’:
It isn’t
constitutional and it isn’t law.
The
Constitution says in plain English that IT is the Supreme Law of the land. The Constitution is the law. The plain words
of the Constitution. The plain words that the people who ratified the
Constitution and its Amendments used when they adopted it and when they amended
it.
The whole
idea of a written constitution is to protect the law from the lawyers. It is
written in the language used by ordinary people. It says what it means and it
means what it says. Nothing less and nothing more.
The idea
that nine unelected life time Justices of the Supreme Court can invent new
civil rights that nobody ever dreamed of when the Constitution was adopted or
amended is not only preposterous: it is a deliberate assault on the Supreme Law
of the Land.
It is a
criminal attack on the sovereignty and
the liberty of the American people.
You cannot
have government of the people, by the people and for the people if the words
the people adopt and ratify are twisted and ignored and re-defined and
contorted to mean what nine self appointed arbiters of national culture want
them to say.
My friends,
it is time for the American people to stand up and say “We have had enough.”
Indeed, we have had more than enough. We have had far too much judge made law
in the United States and it is high time we take back the Supreme Court and
confine it to its constitutional duty of deciding cases and controversies.
When the
Supreme Court decided, in 1857, that an emancipated black man named Dred Scot
could not be a citizen, Abraham Lincoln made it crystal clear that the Supreme
Court does not have the power to make laws.
Supreme
Court decisions are only binding on the parties to a case. They are not the law
of the land, they are the law of the case, and they only affect similar cases
as long as the personnel on the Supreme Court remains the same.
In 1890 the
Supreme Court decided that racial segregation was constitutional. In 1954 that
decision was overruled. It took sixty four years; but it happened.
You and I
have come here this evening to express our support for the right to life of every
human being from conception to natural death.
We are here
tonight because in1973 the United States Supreme Court rendered an opinion in
the case of Roe V Wade to the effect that women have a constitutional right to
a medically assisted abortion.
That
opinion has been roundly criticized by legal experts and scholars for four decades.
That opinion was based on a so called right of privacy which the court admitted
is nowhere to be found in the words of the constitution or the bill of rights. In
his dissenting opinion, Mr. Justice Byron White called the majority opinion a
raw abuse of judicial power.
My friends,
whatever else is going to be decided on November 8, the impact of this election
on the future of the Supreme Court must be our primary concern.
In addition
to the vacancy created by the death of Antonin Scalia, the seats occupied by
Clinton appointees Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer will almost certainly
be vacated in the next eight years, as will the seat held by the infamous swing
voter appointed by Ronald Reagan, Anthony Kennedy.
If the
American people elect a President who sees it as his duty to appoint Justices
who will abide by the plain words of the Constitution, there is every possibility
that the decision in Roe versus Wade will, eventually, be reversed.
The talking
heads on television and elsewhere like to tell us that abortion is a social
issue. Social issue. That’s a nice, gentle way to approach it. Sort of like
which fork to use for the salad, or whether you should take off your hat in an
elevator.
My friends,
There’s nothing social about abortion. It is an evil curse on civilized
mankind. And the
evil visited upon our nation by Roe V Wade is every bit as heinous and immoral and
unconscionable as slavery and Jim Crow.
Margaret
Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a eugenicist. That means she was
a student and an advocate of eugenics. Very simply, eugenics is the science of
improving the human race by breeding stronger, smarter, more beautiful people.
Margaret
Sanger argued in favor of abortion to eliminate poor people, ignorant people, ugly
people. All those unfortunate men and women she claimed had “bad genes.”
People who
were, in her eyes, condemned to be losers. The peasants. The underclass. Especially people of African descent.
Especially people with dark skin.
Her followers
in the abortion industry today still honor Margaret Sanger, and despite all
their pious talk about a woman’s reproductive health, they are
still hell bent on trying to improve the breed of humanity.
It is no
coincidence that most abortion clinics are located in the inner cities of our
nation. Black women are five times as likely to have an abortion than white
women.
In New York
City more black babies are aborted than are born alive. Nearly two thousand
black babies are killed in America every single day. Two thousand. Every single
day. Those “Black Lives Matter” Those “Babies Lives Matter.”
Abortion is
even more than a moral or legal issue. It is a political issue. In fact it is
the most divisive, emotional political issue in America. It divides our nation
as surely and as bitterly as the question of slavery that led to the civil war.
In the
forty years since Roe V. Wade, over 60 million Americans have been denied the
right to be born. Think of what that means to our country. Sixty million
people. More than the combined populations of California and New York.
Sixty
million people under the age of 43. Sixty million Americans who will never work
or save or spend. Sixty million Americans who will never pursue happiness in
this great land of the free and home of the brave. Sixty million Americans who
will never go to college, buy a house, get married, or have children. Sixty
million Americans who will never vote or serve their country in uniform.
I began
these remarks tonight by suggesting that we Americans have a Hobson’s choice in
the Presidential election. Surely the bitterness and scorn which mars our
political rhetoric would seem to justify the conclusion that both Hillary
Clinton and Donald Trump are scoundrels unworthy of the highest office in our
nation.
But the
plain, undeniable fact is that they are divided on the crucial issue of
abortion. Mrs. Clinton would continue her husband’s preference for activist
liberal Supreme Court Justices. Mr. Trump has declared his intention to appoint
Justices in the tradition of Antonin Scalia.
In 1860 the
newly organized Republican Party promised to abolish slavery.
It was also
a bitterly contested election. The Democrats hated Lincoln so much that his life
was threatened. He had to sneak into Washington wearing a disguise.
The
election of 2016 is perhaps the most bitter and divisive since the Civil War.
But for those of us who are pro life, the decision is clear. The Republican
Party was the Party of abolition in 1860 and the Republican Party is the Party
of Life in 2016.
We will
vote for Donald Trump. Not because we like him. We don’t. Not because he is a
role model for our children and grandchildren. He isn’t. Not because he is some great successful,
charismatic leader who promises to make America great again. That remains to be
seen.
We will
vote for Donald Trump for one reason and one reason only: because he has heard
what we are saying; because he has picked up the pro life banner; because he is
committed to the cause of the unborn.
We will
vote for Donald Trump and we will ask Almighty God to inspire him to support
and defend our nation’s Constitution and to appoint Supreme Court Justices who
will restore the Constitution as the Supreme Law of the Land.
We will
vote for Donald Trump because black lives and white lives, and babies lives and
old people’s lives and every human life in this nation and on this planet
matter. They matter to the beneficent Creator whose infinite love has given us
this home.
We will
vote for Donald Trump and we will leave the outcome to the same Almighty God in
whom we Americans have always placed our trust.
We will
leave the outcome to the mighty voice of God’s People on November eighth.
May God
bless each of us, and may God bless the United States of America.
Dear Tom, whenever I read one of your posts referencing the law, I wonder aloud why you aren't sitting on the Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteWonderful speech.
Thank you.
Wonderful oratory, Judge! I bet it sounded even better than it reads
ReplyDeleteYou were preaching to the choir, so no hard sell persuasion was necessary.
I wonder how you would ground the following to a more diverse audience, given the risks inherent in a Trump presidency.
"My friends, whatever else is going to be decided on November 8, the impact of this election on the future of the Supreme Court must be our primary concern."
2000 black children a day, nearly 3/4 of a million a year, if born would give Democrats an irreversible majority in very short order. Their support of abortion is very short-sighted. Additionally, were these children born over the last 40 years, it seems abortion would still be the law of the land and the Supreme Court would, by now,
ReplyDeleteChas Bassos
have no conservatives at all on the bench.
For shame, Chas. I cannot believe that any right thinking conservative would equate elective abortions wth the slaughter of Democrats.
ReplyDelete