SCOTUS: Freedom vs. Fascism?
By Ellis Washington 19 Aug. 2016
Supreme Court building (Western fascade)
Since at least the New Deal, the executive branch has been accumulating more and more power, and the current administration has taken unilateral executive authority to new levels. President Obama has on numerous occasions effectively engaged in lawmaking—an activity strictly delegated to Congress by the Constitution—when Congress refused to pass laws that he desired.
~ Scott Pruitt, Attorney General of Oklahoma
In an earlier essay written in February, 4-4 Tie Deconstructs Supreme Court Oligarchy, I took a cynical tone regarding the even number of Justices on the High Court after the media blackout regarding the assassination of Justice Scalia. I mocked how the progressive media was lamenting the fact that the Republican majority in Congress refused to appoint President Obama’s nominee to SCOTUS which (if conservative cowardice ascends), would in effect tip the delicate balance of power towards a decidedly socialist, activist jurisprudence that pays little attention to the blackletter text of the constitution, or what Justice Scalia called “Textualism”. In that essay I presented in part this narrative:
Jordan Weissmann, a fine writer for Slate.com and Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent, wrote a recent article regarding the negative impact of Scalia’s death will have on the High Court titled, How Scalia’s Death Affects This Term’s Biggest Supreme Court Cases.
“Because of the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court will likely be left with just eight justices for the rest of its term – four reliable liberals, three reliable conservatives, and one Anthony Kennedy, who leans to the right but has traditionally acted as the court’s swing vote. Since Senate Republicans have already said they are not in any hurry to confirm a new justice so long as President Obama remains in office, we’re probably about to witness a number of deeply important cases end in a 4-to-4 split this year,” Weissmann wrote.
This conventional understanding regarding the critical importance of the loss of Justice Antonin Scalia to the High Court was brought into bold relief by Scott Pruitt in a speech delivered on June 30, 2016, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series tilted, The Next Supreme Court Justice.
Scott Pruitt was elected Attorney General of Oklahoma in 2010. Prior to that, he served for eight years in the Oklahoma State Senate. A past president of the Republican Attorneys General Association, he established Oklahoma’s Federalism Unit to combat unwarranted regulation and overreach by the federal government. Mr. Pruitt received his B.A. from Georgetown College and his J.D. from the University of Tulsa College of Law.
Pruitt’s primary concern in his Hillsdale College speech here isn’t with a Court that has a 4-4 tie in some notable cases, but in who or what jurisprudence Scalia’s replacement will likely have—Constitutionalist vs. Anti-Constitutionalist worldview—Freedom vs. Fascism. Pruitt says:
Make no mistake: the liberal justices on the Court nearly always vote as a bloc. Whereas the conservative justices occasionally depart for reasons of judicial philosophy from what some might consider the conservative outcome—as Justice Scalia often did—one is hard-pressed to find decisions where a liberal justice’s vote is in question. To illustrate the point, in the Supreme Court’s 2014-2015 term, the four liberal justices agreed with each other over 90 percent of the time—more agreement than between any two conservative justices. For example, Chief Justice Roberts agreed with Justice Thomas in only 70 percent of cases. If the liberal wing of the Court is given a five-justice majority, we should expect that no controversial decision of the Court will ever be in doubt.
The fact that socialist jurists on the Court virtually always vote as a block against the U.S. Constitution, against Natural Law and Natural Rights which is the original intent of the constitutional Framers, gets little mention by the propaganda press, yet next Pruitt gives an important overview of the significant issues the Court may very well decide next term, once a ninth justice is appointed. First, Pruitt cited several upcoming cases SCOTUS would be deciding one is regarding freedom of speech, specifically can the government regulate force citizens to contribute to political causes they disagree with? In the case Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, granted review prior to Scalia’s death, where a group of public sector employees wanted the right not to pay compulsory union dues.
Justice Antonin Scalia in caricature by Richard Thompson
Freedom vs. Fascism is often the dualism the Court wrestles with as the Friedrichs case determines the question—can the government mandate citizens to support political causes they abhor? Under a Freedom worldview the answer would be No. However, under a Fascist worldview the answer would decidedly be, Yes. Thus the absence to Justice Scalia’s vote leaves the Court divided (both numerically and philosophically) and this important freedom of speech question will only be definitively decided once a ninth Justice is appointed.
Pruitt then corrects the popular misconception of the Citizens United case, saying “On the other side of the free speech coin is the continued vitality of the Court’s Citizens United decision. Let me clarify a common misconception: Citizens United did not hold that corporations are allowed to give unlimited amounts to political candidates. In fact, the laws limiting the amount of campaign contributions to a few thousand dollars are still valid and in place.” He’s right on this point because the Citizens United case “the Court held that the government may not limit the amount of money spent—whether by individuals, unions, or corporations—on their own independent political advocacy. This case was decided 5 to 4, with Justice Scalia in the majority. If he is replaced with a liberal, Citizens United will likely be overturned, and the right to free speech will be greatly diminished.”
In my opinion, the most important part of Pruitt’s Hillsdale College speech on the Supreme Court was in regards to the First Amendment protections on religious liberty. “Before Justice Scalia passed away, the Supreme Court granted review in Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Pauley, a case which will decide whether certain state laws called “Blaine Amendments” are constitutional,” Pruitt said.
Blaine Amendments are provisions added to state constitutions during a time of anti-Catholic fervor—they date back to the 1870s—that prevent any state funds from being used to benefit a church or a religion for any reason. This means that states running programs that provide resources to private institutions must discriminate against religious institutions, even if the program being funded is not religious. In the Trinity Lutheran case, a Missouri program was providing scrap tires for flooring in playgrounds to make them safer for children. Because of a Blaine Amendment, the State refused to provide tires to church schools. With other attorneys general, I filed a brief supporting the effort to get these Blaine Amendments struck down. The new justice is likely to cast the deciding vote on whether to remove this legacy of legal hostility to religion.
The anti-religious bigotry of the Baine amendments against Christianity is derivative of an earlier essay I had written last year where I traced this existential Progressive hatred of religion back to the first welfare state of the Modern Age—the administration of Germany’s Chancellor Otto von Bismarck (1871-90). Then I wrote:
On pages 168-69 of Jonah Goldhagen’s iconic book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, the author compares the condition of Jews in the Third Reich with that of American slaves and uses some of the research by the great social scientist Orlando Patterson. “Social death is a formal status. According to Orlando Patterson, it is the violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored people,” Goldhagen writes. “It is at once a culturally shared conception of the socially dead people and a set of at once a culturally shared conception of the socially dead people and a set of practices towards them. The two are intertwined and mutually dependent.” Goldhagen continues:
The most well-known category of people who have been socially dead, for whom the term was coined, are slaves, though the universe of the social dead has been inhabited by people other than slaves… Slaves are socially dead people who, in most slave societies, are conceived of as human and who have utilitarian value, indeed great utilitarian value. In Germany during the Nazi period, Jews were socially dead people – they were violently dominated, natally alienated, and deemed incapable of bearing honor – who were not thought to be a part of the human race, and who were seen to have virtually no utilitarian value.
This is exactly my contention when I stated repeatedly in my ongoing essay series on Nazi Socialism vs. Wilson-FDR-LBJ-Obama Socialism that the evil actions by Hitler and the Nazis weren’t that original particularly in their galling grotesqueries against the Jews and other “undesirables” or Untermensch (subhumans). However, the Nazis were dutiful students of history who learned from their own German leaders of the past like nineteenth century proto-fascist Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany (1871-90), a hero and model to Hitler and the Nazis. Von Bismarck was a vile demagogue who believed in the primacy of the State and first country to institute the Welfare State in Europe (predating FDR by 60 years!) Also, Von Bismarck’s venal anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic policies effectively removed religion from the public marketplace of ideas, and instituted an evolution atheism based on Darwin’s pseudo-scientific screeds, thus paving the way for Hitler’s anti-Christian Holocaust 60 years later in the 1930s and 40s.
Going back to the apotheosis of liberalism (and later Socialism and Progressivism) under the French Revolution, where people like the Jacobins, Robespierre, Saint Jus, Marat and other scoundrels delighted in destroying religious rights and wantonly murdering Christians by the tens of thousands. (e.g., recall the slaughter in the Vendée region [1793-96] amounting to over 130,000 deaths French Catholic Christians alone).
Otto von Bismarck’s Social Welfare State—Motivated not by compassion, but by Political Self-Interest and hatred of Christianity
Progressives hatred of religion generally and particularly their bias against Christianity exists because God is the ultimate ‘check and balance’ against the vagaries and grotesqueries of human nature which they must exploit to enact their policies ‘for the general good’. Placing this legal analysis of the Supreme Court under a historical paradigm, Pruitt essentially concurred with my meta-historical worldview, “Since at least the New Deal, the executive branch has been accumulating more and more power, and the current administration has taken unilateral executive authority to new levels. President Obama has on numerous occasions effectively engaged in lawmaking—an activity strictly delegated to Congress by the Constitution—when Congress refused to pass laws that he desired,” Pruitt wrote.
Nevertheless, I contend how can a jurisprudence of Freedom triumph over a jurisprudence of Fascism where Congress and We the People continue to allow the leftist judicial renegades on the Court to rampage over the Constitution without reprisals? Pruitt said, “the Supreme Court’s 2014-2015 term, the four liberal justices agreed with each other over 90 percent of the time—more agreement than between any two conservative justices. It is Congress’s job to check and balance the Supreme Court when they step outside of their constitutional strictures under the Separation of Powers doctrine.
Under the Weltanschauung (worldview) of the Progressive Revolution, as liberal fascism morphs into socialism slavery, America increasingly finds all of her institutions and traditions under existential attack by the Obama administration and the Progressives. Under this Progressive Revolution apparatchiks, I call ‘Holocaust Democrats’ are hellbent on deconstructing every Judeo-Christian tradition and institution in America so that the last barrier to enact their globalist evil intent will be removed thus fulfilling the words of Pruitt whereby “the next Supreme Court justice will make decisions that touch on the rights of every American and that may come to define the nature of our government and our society for many years to come.”
Freedom vs. Fascism?— Demonstrative of this existential dualism I wrote about earlier is a bombshell story regarding hacked documents from George Soros’s Open Society Institute—acts that in my opinion are tantamount to treason whereby this ubiquitous mega-billionaire and his socialist activists foundation helped to effectively lobby the Obama administration into increasing to 100,000 the total number of refugees taken in by the U.S. annually, according to a report by Breitbart Jerusalem.
Yet without these hacked documents, if a conservative writer said these things, the propaganda press would immediately label him a peddler of “conspiracy theories.”
Category: Commentary
