By CHRISTOPHER MANION
In the past few days, several opinions issued by the U.S. Supreme Court have radically revamped the legal lay of the land in the United States.
In large part, the Court has done so by restoring essential elements of the balance of powers established by the Founding Fathers and enshrined in the Constitution.
The impact of the cases decided this month can only be described as massive.
Consider Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which overturned Roe v. Wade last Friday: For fifty years, discussion of advances in the understanding of the early stages of unborn life have been life have been ruled out of order in America’s public square. “No Trespassing! Court Order!”
A mandatory secular consciousness was imposed on the lives of ordinary Americans, and it became increasingly oppressive with each passing year.
The assertion of Roe as an ironclad precedent gave the abortion lobby free and unfettered control not only of the law, but of every aspect of the public conversation. In classic Orwellian fashion, a “woman’s right to choose” became a required ingredient in the basic working vocabulary of two generations of Americans born since 1973.
And that’s not all. Beyond abortion, consider the Court’s findings in Carson v. Makin and Kennedy v. Bremerton School District. When considered alongside Dobbs, these cases lay the groundwork for a renaissance of religious freedom in the public square.
For decades, prayer, the Ten Commandments, and even the most remote hint of religious content have been driven from the public square, including public schools.
Can that powerful momentum be reversed?
It won’t happen by itself. We have to make it happen.
Each of these cases unlocks a door that has been barred and bolted for half a century and more.
In the meantime, America’s public life has been flooded with the propaganda of the secular Left. Masquerading as “science” and “progress,” it infected every aspect of American life.
We had to listen to it every single day. And, as a result, we Deplorables have become well-versed in digesting, parsing, and countering every lie great and small in the liberal history lesson.
We’ve had to.
And for fifty years and more, while we’ve been subjected to an endless flood of the rancid swill of the Left, two generations of Americans haven’t had to consider our views. They haven’t heard them.
Abortion? It came naturally. They haven’t had to think about it.
In fact, they haven’t had to think at all.
And now that they’ve finally been dragged out of Plato’s Cave by reality, they are dumbfounded.
They’re screaming. They’re violent. They’re angry. They’re hateful. The expletives flow like the swill in the D.C. Hot Tub.
But in the midst of it all, they haven’t proven capable of producing a logical sentence, much less an argument.
Instead, they want to punish us. Punish Donald Trump. Punish Clarence Thomas. Kill Justice Kavanaugh. Burn Catholic churches.
“You won’t know what hit you,” screamed Sen. Chuck Schumer in front of the Supreme Court two years ago.
Well, today it’s the Left that doesn’t know what hit them.
Why?
It was the Constitution.
The States And The People
Robert Nisbet, America’s premier sociologist of the twentieth century, once observed that in 1913, the year he was born, the only contact the average American had with the federal government was the Post Office.
Twenty-seven years later, Notre Dame Law Dean Clarence Manion explained the constitutional foundation for Nisbet’s observation.
Those who invoke “the Constitution” should do so with care, he wrote.
“We have more than one Constitution in the United States,” he wrote. “We have forty-nine Constitutions [at the time, 48 states and the District of Columbia: ed.] to be exact. Those who think of Americanism in terms of ‘The’ Constitution are undoubtedly thinking about the Constitution of the United States. They forget that the State Constitution touches the average American citizen one hundred times while the Federal Constitution is touching him once.”
And every one of those State Constitutions gratefully invokes the blessing of Almighty God, he observed.
They still do (except for Tennessee. However, the Volunteer State’s Constitution does include this provision: “No person who denies the being of God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this state.” [Article 9, Sec.2]).
Yet today, in the view of the secular Left, the very public mention of God, especially with authority, in a public place, should be a capital crime like it is in Communist China.
Query: Should a government school pupil be permitted to read out loud in class the text of the Declaration of Independence?
After all, it mentions God five times.
Fifty years ago, The Wanderer’s longtime friend Charlie Rice posed this question to his Constitutional Law class at Notre Dame:
“Imagine a student showing his class a dollar bill and asking, ‘Teacher, it says here, “In God We Trust.” Is that true?’”
Fifty years ago, the public school teacher might have flinched.
Today, her stock response would be, “Johnny, those people were racists. We’re so much better today! Go and check your pronouns now, please.”
There are some remnants of this America scattered through today’s legal wastelands. In fact, even today the Constitution of my own Commonwealth of Virginia begins with “Article I. Bill of Rights,” Article 16 of which reads as follows:
“That religion, or the duty which we owe to our CREATOR, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity, towards each other.”
But in 1958, Chief Justice Earl Warren smugly declared it a “settled doctrine” that the whim of five justices was now the “Supreme Law of the Land.”
This is the perverse principle that allowed the Supreme Court to overturn “The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” fifteen years later in Roe v. Wade.
Unlike so many cases since the days of the Warren Court, the Dobbs decision doesn’t make new law. It merely finds that the Court has no jurisdiction over abortion at all.
The Dobbs decision limits federal power rather than brandishing it. That why the Left is outraged.
The Return Of “We The People”
For fifty years, deliberation and restoration in large sectors of American life have been forbidden because the Supreme Court said so. Now the floodgates have opened, and we can expect one of the most vibrant eras of debate and legislation on the state level in memory.
The Dobbs case returns to the states their jurisdiction over a vast and formerly forbidden realm.
Legislation on issues like contraception, euthanasia, sodomy, marriage, sex, and gender now falls under the province of the states.
The possibilities are manifold.
The word “abortion” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, Justice Alito observes.
Well, neither does “education.” And there, cases like Carson v. Makin, Kennedy v. Bremerton, and Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue (2020) constitute an historic opportunity for the states and the people to radically transform the field of education.
Their job might be easier if they start by posting the Ten Commandments on the wall of every classroom.
In coming years, fifty states will compete to develop innovative approaches that have to reflect the will of the people, free from intrusion from Washington’s unelected bureaucracies and their school union allies.
And where will those innovators turn to for guidance?
“Our whole civilization is based on the Judeo-Christian tradition and that tradition is under sustained attack by increasingly militant secular forces,” former Attorney General Bill Barr told a Chicago audience last Saturday.
Those forces have had free rein for the past half-century, as the sovereignty of states has been stuck in Washington’s bottom drawer.
It’s time for “the States and the People” to reclaim their constitutional role.
And that means us.
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