Judges Usurping Power leading to oligarchy

[ Bible Probe ]

Posted by Bible Probe on July 03, 2005 at 11:46:56:

Judges are usurping power meant for the Executive and Legislative Branches. They are making moral and religious decisions regardless of and against the overwelming feeling of the country. And why does our do nothing Congress--letting it happen? We see this also happening on another leve in the New England Legislatures. The people overwelming are against Gay Marriage, yet the New England Legislatures are one by one voting for it.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution feared a judiciary that might abuse its power. But even most of them did not envision the judicial oligarchy that confronts Americans in this 21st century. In case after case, judges and "last word" Supreme Court justices have substituted their personal opinions for the clear meaning of the Constitution or the law.

Thomas Jefferson knew what the framers of the Constitution envisioned. He warned us about these Judges--but not about the State Legislatures who no longer represent the by and for the people, and the "will of the people".

"Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God."
-Thomas Jefferson, motto found among his papers

"The Constitution is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please." - Thomas Jefferson, Sept 6, 1819

"To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men and not more so. They have with others the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps. Their maxim is boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem [good justice is broad jurisdiction], and their power the more dangerous as they are in office for life and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves."

-Thomas Jefferson to W. Jarvis, 1820


"The question whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law has been heretofore a subject of consideration with me in the exercise of official duties. Certainly there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches." —Thomas Jefferson to W. H. Torrance, 1815. ME 14:303

"The Constitution . . . meant that its coordinate branches should be checks on each other. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves in their own sphere of action but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch." —Thomas Jefferson to Abigail Adams, 1804. ME 11:51


Letter to Abigail Adams, September 11, 1804: “The opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not, not only for themselves, in their own sphere of action, but for the Legislature and Executive also in their spheres, would make the Judiciary a despotic branch.”

Letter to Edward Livingston, March 25, 1825: “One single object… [will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of restraining the judges from usurping legislation.”

Letter to Monsieur A. Coray, October 31, 1823: “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.”

Letter to Charles Hammond, August 18, 1821: “The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.”
Thomas Jefferson worried that the Courts would overstep their authority and instead of interpreting the law would begin making law. An oligarchy - the rule of the few over many.

Letter to Thomas Ritchie, Dec. 25, 1820: “The judiciary of the United States is the subtle corps of sappers and miners constantly working under ground to undermine the foundations of our confederated fabric. They are construing our constitution from a co-ordination of a general and special government to a general and supreme one alone. This will lay all things at their feet, and they are too well versed in English law to forget the maxim, ‘boni judicis est ampliare jurisdictionem.’”

Letter to Thomas Ritchie, Dec. 25, 1820: “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.”

The next two quotations, from Jefferson’s best biographer, Dumas Malone, summarize Jefferson’s views on the dangers of judicial activism. They come from Volume 6 of Malone’s work, “Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello.”

Dumas Malone, p. 349: “In his opinion, the most irresponsible of the public functionaries were the judges. While fully recognizing the importance of their independence from a king, as in England, he regarded judicial independence from popular control as a solecism in a self-governing society. He believed that, if appointed, they should be named for terms of years by the governor, not chosen by the legislature, and that in any case they should be removable on concurrence of the legislative and the executive.”

Dumas Malone, p. 353: “Private comments on the role of the federal judiciary, made about a year later, had some currency in Massachusetts. These were in a letter to William Charles Jarvis of Pittsfield, who had sent him a work entitled The Republican. In this [Jefferson] found what he regarded as a dangerously erroneous doctrine – namely, that judges were ‘the ultimate arbiters’ in all constitutional matters. He said that he himself knew of ‘no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves.’ He expressly stated that such power did not belong to a judicial oligarchy whose members were irresponsible and irremovable… Jefferson was arguing chiefly against what he regarded as an unwarranted assumption of authority over the executive and legislative branches of the federal government.”


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