ARE YOU FED UP WITH JUDGES ACCOUNTABLE TO NO ONE?

The Bill of Rights Handbook



 
We Want Our Country Back
. . . And We Need Your Help

by Michael H. Brown

Copyright 2005
 

    When our ancestors enacted our Bill of Rights in 1791 they knew exactly what they meant by the words used.

    The judges appointed at the federal level and their counterparts at the state level have quite often found meanings in the Bill of Rights that the original authors never intended.  Our United States Supreme Court judges have often indulged in this practice.

    Other lower courts, both federal and state, slavishly adhere to Supreme Court "precedent," no matter how erroneous, unconstitutional, or wrong-headed.

    This has to stop.

    The Bill of Rights was enacted to protect us from government and government agents.  Those agents include politically appointed, elected by no one, judges whose desire to maintain the status quo more often than not exceeds their sense of duty to administer justice.

    The Bill of Rights Restoration Act I am proposing here needs to be enacted to protect us from government and government agents, particularly those who think they have a mandate to change the meaning and intent of those who gave us the first ten amendments of the United States Constitution, our Bill of Rights.

    The Constitution is a written instrument. As such its meaning does not alter.  That which is meant when adopted, it means now.  South Carolina v. United States, 26 S. Ct. 110, 111 (1905).

    In today's courts this is no longer true. The Constitution means anything any federal or state judge wants it to mean to suit the exigencies of the moment.

    Thomas Jefferson saw it coming.

"At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government.  Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions, nevertheless, become law by precedent, sapping, by little and little, the foundations of the constitution, and working its change by construction, before any one has perceived that that invisible and
helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life, if secured against all liability to account."

 --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Monsieur A. Coray, October 31, 1823.

"The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confeder-ated fabric.  . . . A judiciary independent of a king or executive alone, is a good thing; but independence of the will of the nation is a solecism, at least in a republican government."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to Thomas Ritchie, December 25, 1820.

    It's now up to us to reverse it.