The Discerning Texan

As the Republican Party allows itself to drift away from traditional American viewpoints, such as defending the President's constitutional right to have the judges he selects receive "advice and consent" from the Senate--the whole Senate--the party puts its own future at jeopardy.

Included in the set of values that must be defended are principles that are the very reason that our founders chose to fight the original American Revolution: For freedom to determine our own destiny. Freedom to not allow the government to infringe upon your privacy against your will. Certainly, it is a razor's edge between legitimate National Security necessities and an Orwellian "big brother" nightmare. But it is not controversial for the Party to stand for protecting the right of people to self-determination: and to allow a despotic judiciary to ignore laws passed by the people's elected representatives; to have gotten to a place where when the people's Congress enacts laws, only to have tyrannical elites wearing black robes to toss the will of the people into the wastebin of history, often on a whim or at the behest of well-funded interest groups--to the point where increasingly the Constitution is treated as if it is not worth the paper it is written on---To have witnessed these events in the United States of America is to have reached a point in our history that is nothing short of dictatorship by a runaway activist judiciary. To a patriotic American, this is an abomination.

Would Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton have stood for this? Is this is not why they and the other patriots who ended British hegemony and terror: in order to establish separate and equal branches of government? The Constitution was created by wise and noble men, and its symmetry is brilliant: it is crafted so that one branch was not allowed to trump the other two branches. This is discussed widely, throughout the Federalist papers and agreed-upon by almost all of the framers. In fact, even the anti-Federalists who argued against the Constitution in the 1780's gave as a reason that it gave judges too much power. So this is not just an issue du jour for Americans--it is the very soul of who we the Americans are: we are in charge of our own destiny--and we have Representatives and a President who are supposed to govern according to the will of the people, not the other way around. We cannot allow the court to be stacked by renegade judges who would take this right away from us. And Republicans can not sit by idly and allow a few activist Democrats to prevent the President from stemming this tide of judges who don't take the Constitution seriously. We cannot allow them to negatively assert themselves against the powers of Congress, the President, and the people they represent. We must not allow that to happen. If we don't act now to force our leadership to take a stand against this kind of judiciary, and in favor of the people's will--we stand to lose everything.

President Bush's nominees must have an up or down vote on the floor of the Senate. These nominees might be the only thing left between us and a runaway judiciary that effectively puts an end to the American dream. Up to three Supreme Court judges could announce their retirement in the next two years, and there will be large numbers of vacancies at the District and Appeals judge-level. Republicans need to be true to their Conservative principles, or else election results won't even matter anymore--because the will of the people will have been usurped from us. What is "American" about that?

UPDATE: Karl Spence believes that what we need is another Constitutional Amendment. Read his entire essay, it is excellent.