Supreme Court Usurps State Department
Posted By John Moore on November 3, 2003
Not satisfied with having taken over or obstructed much of the legislative function of government, the Supreme Court is now taking over part of the executive function! It is arrogating to itself decisions regarding foreign policy.
According to Justice O’Connor:
“The impressions we create in this world are important, and they can leave their mark,”
and
In 2002, she said, the high court regarded world opinion when it ruled executing the mentally retarded to be unconstitutional.
Nowhere in the Constitution is the judicial system given the power to craft our foreign image, and its decisions should not be based on pleasing the fickle Europeans!
In a related area:
Breyer had held that a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights that homosexuals had a fundamental right to privacy in their sexual behavior showed the Supreme Court’s earlier decision to the contrary was unfounded in the Western tradition [emphasis added].
This particular piece of reasoning is truly amazing. Regardless of what the European Court of Human Rights says, homosexuality itself is basically unfounded in western tradition (unless you count Greek pederasty), much less some imagined right to privacy for the act itself. If homosexual privacy was so much in western tradition, why is sodomy still illegal in many western countries, and why was it traditionally illegal in the United States?
While the ruling invalidates an outdated and offensive law, the reasoning is frightening! It uses invalid facts to push the rulings of a foreign court into US jurisprudence.
The Europeans also oppose the death penalty, which is in the Constitution and is accepted by a majority of Americans. Will the court cause European fashion to eliminate our death penalty rules? No doubt there are many unamerican opinions held by Europeans and upheld by European courts. Will they now become part of our system of law?
Perhaps in its zeal to be popular with the internationalists, the Supreme Court will next condemn Zionism and engage in anti-semitism, a popular sport among many international bodies and the elite of Europe.
Perhaps the court will rule that our war in Iraq is illegal, because the French don’t like it! After all, war too is an executive function, so the court might as well steal it too!
Scalia, as usual, gets it right when he talks about the Sodomy case:
“The court’s discussion of these foreign views (ignoring, of course, the many countries that have retained criminal prohibitions on sodomy) is … meaningless dicta. Dangerous dicta, however, since this court … should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans,
A justice who attempts to sneak the power of foreign institutions into US jurisprudence is not only misusing the office, but skirting too close to internationalism. It is an anti-American fashion.
Perhaps it’s time for Congress to take sides, and exercise its power to impeach a justice or to add more justices to the court. But no, the judges know that as long as the Democrats have blocking power, and the press worships at their feet, nothing can be done to dethrone or defang them – no matter how far they move away from the consitution and their proper function. Generations now have been taught by the left in schools and the media that what the court rules is the only proper interpretation of law and the Constitution.
As a “Fickle” European I can relate to the frustration you guys have over “Euro” views affecting your own laws and politics.
I have a similar problem as a Brit, finding my own country’s laws can be superceded by the “supremacy” of European law.
In other words, the crass moral judgements of other sovreign nations can now become law in my own country.
USA – hang on to your independence.