The Supreme Court is an independent legislative body, and like all legislatures, needs take no heed of the acts of other legislative bodies or its own prior actions when it makes new law. We need look no farther than this term to see how completely true this has now become.

It is bizarre for conservatives to contemplate that it was once usual for Senates to act as a brake on democratic impulses. Once, Senates, both Federal and state, were apportioned by land area. Federal Senators were appointed by State legislatures with no direct input from voters. Now, Federal Senators are elected by the people, and The Supreme Court declared that Senates on the state level must be strictly democratic. So now the Supreme Court has morphed into exactly the old-style Senate it condemned.

But this is hardly a matter for encouragement by conservatives, for the old arrangement, intended to insure no momentary democratic fad became law, it is in modern times a blunt instrument by which the elites permanently deny the desires of the majority. Old-timers may recalled the never-ending campaign of the liberal cartoonist Herblock to repeal the electoral college because it was non-democratic. Now the liberals love their new non-democratic legislature (except when it does something non-liberal, which candidate Gephardt promises to overrule by executive order).

Power to the people! is now a properly conservative slogan. Forget all the proposed consitutional amendments. We need an amendment that reforms the Supreme Court, ending its days as our Supreme Legislature.

A word about the immigration angle in all this is necessary. The whole “diversity” mantra is necessary as the noble lie that holds the increasingly ethnically diverse US society together. But most of that “diversity” is created by immigration. The demands for greater “diversity” are driven by ethnic groups who are growing in power due to demographic growth. These facts are in the minds of politicians (Bush administration and its luke warm opposition to quotas and pro “diversity” rhetoric), school administrators (who wish to avoid legislative penalties by not having sufficiently “diverse” student bodies) and even by the supreme court (who balks at having a “diverse” society without proportional group representation). Immigration is driving this - if quotas and affirmative action were a matter of blacks alone the rhetoric of “diversity” would not have nearly the impact it does.

So, what is the solution. Increasingly it seems that whites will have to choose the route of the Jared Taylor’s and Sam Francis’s, they will have to organize to protect their own group rights.

Gary wrote: “We need an amendment that reforms the Supreme Court, ending its days as our Supreme Legislature.”

I echo the sentiment, but I suspect you’re not understanding completely how things got to be the way they are. No amendment to the Constitution can “reform” the Supreme Court along the lines you advocate and remain consistent with other amendments currently in effect. First, a little history:

Originally, the Supreme Court was not looked upon as the final judge and arbiter of the Constitution’s meaning. This is because the people were rightly fearful of putting such awesome power into the hands of a few unelected judges. If you would have taken a poll in the early nineteenth century, it probably would have resulted in 90% or better of the American people believing that Congress had the authority to override Supreme Court decisions. That view was a commonplace. However, due to several significant political developments involving the Court, and later (and most significantly of all) the Civil War, this view was eventually overruled by the powers that be and Congress surrendered up its presumption of power to the Court. How and why did this happen?

It happened because the argument over the peoples’ will vs. Declaration propositionalism came to the fore. In the South, one segment of society was being kept in bondage by another, in direct contradiction (according to the North) of the plain meaning of the words of the Declaration of Independence: “…all men are created equal.” Thus the question arose: did the people have the authority to contradict the Declaration, the fount of American first principles, in this way, or was there some higher authority that could be invoked to thwart their will? To make a long story short and spare everyone a laundry list of historical details, in the end the status quo was turned around, the people’s will was no longer supreme, and the Supreme Court became the highest arbiter of law in the land. Several new amendments were quickly passed in the wake of the war cementing this new political order in place and things have never been the same since (although it in fact took many decades for politicos to really pick up the ball with gusto and run with it).

It is because of these post-war amendments that even a direct amendment denying ultimate authority to the Supreme Court and putting it back in the hands of the people and their states would be extremely problematic from a legal and logical standpoint. On the one hand we would have amendments guaranteeing equal protection of the law to all, and on the other an amendment making it impossible to back up those self-same “guarantees.” We simply couldn’t have it both ways. Either we are going to be ruled by the people (albeit through their Congress) or we are going to be ruled by someone else. For years we have been ruled by someone else. The question we all have to ask ourselves is, are we actually better off than if we were (still) ruled by the people? Would all this nonsense we complain about every day have happened? Would worse have happened? Or would the people’s good sense and desire to live in peace have brought about, in the main, a happier and more just condition for all Americans?

We can argue about that, but that’s the question. That is also the true dividing line between liberal and conservative in America in my view. Those who champion the consolidated state with the Supreme Court as king are on the liberal side, while those who favor state’s rights and local rule are on the conservative. The alternative definitions of liberal and conservative, as championed on this site—both groups in favor of the consolidated state with the Supremes at the helm, and the argument being simply over the ends to which Leviathan is to be put—is the one, as Mr. Auster says, which has currency today, but since it does not include my own position it is the reason I don’t consider myself a conservative according to popular usage but rather something else; a paleoconservative, I guess.

Posted by: Bubba on June 26, 2003 08:42 PM
“That is also the true dividing line between liberal and conservative in America in my view. Those who champion the consolidated state with the Supreme Court as king are on the liberal side, while those who favor state’s rights and local rule are on the conservative. The alternative definitions of liberal and conservative, as championed on this site—both groups in favor of the consolidated state with the Supremes at the helm, and the argument being simply over the ends to which Leviathan is to be put”

bubba’s traditional conservatism, currently called paleo-conservatism, is the outward expression of the conservative theory expressed by matt. both were supplanted by the enlightenment jacobinism which came into its own via the french revolution.

shawn didn’t like my link to alternet, a site shawn would never take seriously. just for the record, i’d never even heard of alternet befor i found the alternet article as a link at another site.

i wonder if shawn feels the same way about world net daily as he does about alternet.

“The following claims are true, for I am George W. Bush, compassionate, honorable, decent, born-again and completely without guile.”
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=33313