Supreme Court power

Comments from the Molech Today entry of this blog, first from Dr. Joe Pojman, executive director of Texas Alliance for Life and then from me...

Joe Pojman, Ph.D. said...
Dan,

We very much appreciate your passionate opposition to the destruction of innocent human lives through abortion. All of us at Texas Alliance for Life share that passion. That passion is what drives us each and every day. We believe that everyone has a moral obligation to oppose abortion, through legislation and through compassionate alternatives to abortion.

The simple reality is that the US Supreme Court prevents states and the Congress from banning abortion. That is the tragic reality. You may be unaware that Louisiana banned abortion in 1992. The federal courts ruled that the ban is unconstitutional under Roe v. Wade. The ban has never been enforced and cannot be enforced unless Roe v. Wade is overturned.

Any kind of ban on abortion, including a ban stemming from a "personhood" law, will suffer the same result. That's not what we want, but that is the legal reality.

To ignore the legal reality of Roe v. Wade is a bit like ignoring the reality of gravity. To pass a law that bans abortion while ignoring the reality of the US Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade is like driving a bus full of children off a cliff while pretending that gravity does not exist. Both actions will predictably result in tragedy. That is not our preference, but it is the undeniable reality.

Anytime a pro-life law is struck down under Roe v. Wade, Roe is further strengthened, and that makes Roe harder to overturn. That is a huge price to pay.

Here is an excellent article in Human Life Review that outlines the problems with the type of personhood law that you seem to advocate. I strongly recommend a thorough reading of this article:

http://www.humanlifereview.com/2009_fall/Linton.pdf

The author, Mr. Paul Linton, is a highly respected pro-life constitutional expert. I would very much like to continue this dialogue, but I would like to direct the discussion to Mr. Linton's article.

Finally, to answer the very important question about how to overturn Roe v. Wade, I point out that we need at least five of the nine justices. We need to elect a pro-life president who will appoint at least one more justice who recognizes that Roe v. Wade is a very bad decision and is willing to overrule it. It takes at least five votes, and it appears that we have four.

Joe Pojman, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Texas Alliance for Life


May 29, 2010 8:04 AM
Dan Hawkins said...
Dr. Pojman, thank you for your response. Mr. Linton makes some good points, but there are things in his article with which I strongly disagree. Linton, like so many other people over the last 37 years, abdicates so much power over to the United States Supreme Court, power that was never given to it by the Consitution, the "supreme law of the land." Linton correctly asserts "that the legislature makes the laws, the judiciary interprets them, and the executive enforces them." But what of the Constitution itself? It gives no authority to the judiciary for intepreting the document that created that judiciary. Indeed, all of Linton's citations of the Supreme Court's power to interpret the Constitution come from statements made by the Supreme Court itself. The Court took this power and just made it its own.

Thomas Jefferson once said that the States were not united by a submission to some powerful central government, but "by a compact under the style and title of a Constitution for the United States." He went on to say that "The government created by this compact was not made the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, since that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution the measure of its powers…" (Kentucky Resolutions of 1798).

The tragedy of Roe v. Wade is that it has been given the same weight as a Constitutional Amendment when it shouldn't be. The Founding Fathers made amending the Constitution very difficult, and with good reason. The Court has given to itself the power to basically rewrite the Constitution faster than the States can legally amend it, and we are seeing the result of this now with rapidly expanding federal power and record spending and entitlements.

The Supreme Court is a body that has repeatedly ruled that certain living human beings can be treated as property (Dred Scot, Roe v. Wade, Doe v. Bolton, etc.) and can either be bought and sold or killed at will by certain parties. It is time to stand up to the Supreme Court and put a check and balance on this power that it has siezed for itself.

Personhood is a movement to recognize that unborn children are living human beings with the God-given, unalienable right to life and liberty. It is also a challenge to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Abortion is today what slavery was in the early nineteenth century. It took States' secession and a Civil War to end slavery, and, while those States that did secede did so for the wrong reasons in the 1800s, it make take state secession to end abortion. But the battle right now is for full personhood in Texas. Once we get that realized, it will be up to the Supreme Court to decide on whatever challenges are made to it (challenges, by the way, that will be made based on the Supreme Court's own horrendous and illegal decisions of the past). If it rules as it has previously, then I will devote all my energy to the secession of Texas from the United States of America.

The movie "The Untouchables" presents a fictionalized account of the war between government officials and the Al Capone gang. There is a scene in which Sean Connery's character, dying from multiple gunshot wounds, gives a very important piece of information to Elliot Ness (played by Kevin Costner). Connery's character, with his last bit of strength, grabs Ness's collars and says, "What are you prepared to do!?" Dr. Pojman, we are in a war against forces that, every day, commit the most atrocious acts of violence against the most defenseless of human beings. What are we prepared to do?


And an addendum by yours truly....

And just to clarify for the record, I am not in favor of Texas secession for the sake of secession. It should be used only as a last resort to bring the federal government back to what the Constitution first envisioned. We need to make this fight about the children who are being murdered. To do that, we need to take on the ones who are enabling this murder. This includes the Supreme Court and the other branches of government who have abdicated so much authority to it.

This is the most serious issue of our time, and we cannot continue to sit back and continue doing the same things we have been doing for the past 37 years. You say that we "need to elect a pro-life president who will appoint at least one more justice who recognizes that Roe v. Wade is a very bad decision and is willing to overrule it." Well, we have had two years of Ford; eight years of Reagan, four years of Bush I, and eight years of Bush II. When Obama's term began, seven of the nine Supreme Court justices had been nominated by supposedly pro-life Republican presidents. If we really care about the genocide that we have been allowing for the past 37 years, we simply cannot be passive any more.