By DEXTER DUGGAN
As the workweek concluded on June 26, national radio talk host Hugh Hewitt declared it to be a week “pivotal in the life of the country.”
On two successive days, June 25 and 26, the Catholic-majority U.S. Supreme Court had issued two utterly baseless, lawless decisions affecting everyone’s life here, and what the rest of the world sees as the example set by America.
Especially dangerous was the court’s obvious assumption that its mere majority vote was enough to compel national obedience — even though the court’s opinions were clearly, demonstrably false, and contrived.
With our basic liberties and rights limited by such deceits, a national alarm must be sounded that this court must firmly be brought to heel before justices can complete bringing us into submission.
Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision upholding Obamacare was so pathetic that a person might have thought of Roberts as a U.S. POW being held by Communist Vietnam 45 years ago, blinking his eyes in Morse code in a propaganda film, revealing that he didn’t actually mean a word of his statement, extracted under duress by captor Obama.
On June 25, in King v. Burwell, the court, including three of its Catholics plus the three non-Catholics, upheld dangerous, death-dealing Obamacare when everything in the case called out for a rejection.
Writing the majority opinion, the Catholic Roberts stood plain law and language on their head, as he also did in 2012, both times saving the life of lawless Obamacare when it seemed destined for the scrapheap. As long as Obamacare lives, no one’s life is secure from malign bureaucratic meddling in medicine and insurance.
The next day, June 26, in Obergefell v. Hodges, Catholic Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the 5-4 majority, joined by Catholic Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the three non-Catholics.
They invented homosexual “marriage” as a fundamental constitutional right, despite being warned of the grave consequences this carried for, among other things, truth, religious liberty, conscience, and the social order.
The narrow Obergefell majority left no doubt that in their view, opposition to unprecedented, unjustifiable homosexual privilege is nothing more than bigotry and prejudice.
When moral traditionalists’ very conscience and liberty are at the mercy of judges who make up rulings out of thin air, the threat couldn’t be plainer for the nation’s future.
Imagine if traffic police were free on their own whim to decide what amount of velocity constituted a speeding violation, what amount of alcohol consumption constituted drunken driving, and how many dead pedestrians constituted any vehicular homicide at all. And then issued the guilty or not guilty verdict right there on the roadside.
That is the formless sort of law the Supreme Court has taken to the highest level. And while some traffic cop may be open to taking a motorist’s bribe to secure lenient treatment, the justices get their unmatchable rewards from the regal lords of the legal, academic, and media establishments at war against America’s welfare.
Through the vagaries of politics and events, the nation’s highest court has ended up with six Catholics among its nine members, unprecedented in the country’s history and certainly not reflecting anything like the population. There isn’t a single Protestant on the highest court of this majority-Protestant nation.
If the legal/political sympathies of the justices were differently balanced, liberal media would be howling from the rooftops to change this religious alignment.
However, as long as the famous breed of a “bad Catholic” or two can be found on the bench — like the Nancy Pelosis and Joe Bidens of the liberal Democrat political world — these media are perfectly pleased.
Catholic Justice Sonia Sotomayor stands with the court’s rock-hard bloc of liberals Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan. If they just can lure one of the court’s other five Catholics to their side for a decision, they win.
On Obamacare, they lured both Roberts and Kennedy. On marriage, they lured Kennedy, and that was plenty.
The other three justices, basically firm conservatives who honor the core tenets of Catholicism, are Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, and Samuel Alito.
Not that anyone should expect justices to rule according to their religion. Except that many of the cases that make their way to the justices these days deal with basic principles that used to be pretty much agreed on morally in society, but now are not, thanks to liberal redefining and intransigence.
In his dissent in the homosexual “marriage” case, Scalia noted the strange imbalance on the court and declared, “no social transformation without representation.” (That case is discussed further elsewhere in this issue of The Wanderer; see p. 5A for this writer’s coverage of it.)
All nine of the justices went to the Harvard or Yale Law Schools, four are natives of New York City, and eight grew up in East or West Coast states, Scalia noted, adding, “Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between.” Not only are there no evangelical Christians, he said, but no Protestants at all.
Most people don’t read Supreme Court decisions. Ignoring their wording is a worse idea for the national welfare than ordering chicken sandwiches then gulping them down whole, without any idea if they’re made of meat or sawdust. A steady diet of sawdust eventually expresses itself through poor health. Unexamined High Court decisions have helped bring us to the current sorry status of our national health.
Perhaps because they know few citizens will examine their reasoning, justices may feel free to pack their decisions with sawdust. If they had to account to most voters for what they wrote, they could show more respect for the law.
Supreme Court justices acting like emperors might as well just give their thumbs-up or thumbs-down verdict on cases without bothering to write an opinion.
Their conclusion still would have the clout that counts, but they’d spare themselves the embarrassment of having to be down on paper, revealing their risible contortions to reach a predetermined result.
For the second time in three years, Chief Justice Roberts, appointed by Republican President George W. Bush, simply made things up in order to placate lawless Democrat Obama and prevent his Obamacare from collapsing due to its own skullduggery.
The words Roberts needed to find to reach a pro-Obamacare decision just weren’t there, but Roberts said Congress meant well anyway, so that was enough for him. This was completely different from his literalist position the following day on same-sex “marriage,” where Roberts in dissent correctly pointed out there was no justification whatever for the Obergefell majority.
Neither the Obergefell petitioners nor the court majority cited “a single case or other legal source providing any basis for such a constitutional claim. None exists, and that is enough to foreclose their claim,” Roberts wrote.
In the other decision, King v. Burwell, the issue was whether the vital subsidies to support Obamacare had to come through the exchanges established by states, or whether they also were available on a federal exchange.
Roberts frankly conceded that the law specified “an exchange established by the state.” And “that’s a problem,” he said, if we use “the most natural meaning.”
Proponents of Obamacare, desperately fearful of how weak their case was, had been putting the word out through friendly media sources for months that “established by the state” were just four words in the law that should be ignored, just a little “gaffe” that didn’t count.
It was widely believed Obamacare would collapse if the subsidies were limited to state exchanges, because relatively few states decided to establish them. This inaction by the states was contrary to the expectations of key Obamacare architects like too-brainy blabbermouth Jonathan Gruber, who openly stated in 2012:
“I think what’s important to remember politically about this is, if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits. . . . I hope that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges, and that they’ll do it.”
In his Burwell dissent, Scalia noted that it was entirely plausible the subsidies “were restricted to state exchanges deliberately — for example, in order to encourage states to establish their own exchanges. We therefore have no authority to dismiss the terms of the law as a drafting fumble.”
Scalia noted that the Burwell majority wanted the actual wording ignored as “inartful drafting.”
“This court, however, has no free-floating power ‘to rescue Congress from its drafting errors’.”
Roberts actually mentioned some scandals in the way Obamacare was rammed and jammed through Congress by a desperate Obama, aware of the growing opposition to his federalized medical dictatorship and fearing it would fall apart. How could Roberts be so candid but vote to uphold it?
To recur to the comparison of Roberts being a POW imprisoned by captor Obama, it’s almost as if the chief justice were saying, “I don’t want to do this, but I’m bring forced to. Please understand.”
Conceding that Obamacare “contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting,” Roberts recalled that “Congress wrote key parts of the act behind closed doors, rather than through ‘the traditional legislative process’.”
The Democrat-controlled Congress also “passed much of the act using a complicated budgetary procedure known as ‘reconciliation,’ which limited opportunities for debate and amendment, and bypassed the Senate’s normal 60-vote filibuster requirement,” Roberts conceded.
“As a result,” Roberts said, “the act does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation.”
In his decision, Roberts even proceeded to mention a cartoon in which a senator is saying, “I admit this new bill is too complicated to understand. We’ll just have to pass it to find out what it means.”
As for the actual Supreme Court case, “Petitioners’ arguments about the plain meaning . . . are strong,” Roberts conceded. However, “In this instance, the context and structure of the act compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase.”
One can only imagine Emperor Obama’s glee at the sad spectacle of the chief justice abasing himself. Obama had used threats, bribes and brazen lies to ram Obamacare through, with the result that it was a legal mess that Obama repeatedly made illegal adjustments to.
Now, when the law’s faults had brought it before the highest court for the second time in three years, Roberts twisted himself into a pretzel again to save it rather than demand that Congress clean up the monstrosity.
It’s not that Obama can do no wrong. He can do everything wrong and get away with it.
From Activism To Oligarchy
In his dissent, Scalia mourned, “Today’s interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of.”
In a statement posted June 26 at National Review, conservative GOP presidential candidate Ted Cruz said:
“This week, we have twice seen Supreme Court justices violating their judicial oaths. Yesterday, the justices rewrote Obamacare, yet again, in order to force this failed law on the American people. Today, the court doubled down with a 5-4 opinion that undermines not just the definition of marriage, but the very foundations of our representative form of government. . . .
“Sadly, the political reaction from the leaders of my party is all too predictable,” Cruz added. “They will pretend to be incensed, and then plan to do absolutely nothing. That is unacceptable. . . .
“By redefining the meaning of common words, and redesigning the most basic human institutions, this court has crossed from the realm of activism into the arena of oligarchy,” Cruz said.
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