This month, President Biden introduced his strategy for “reforming” the Supreme Court, featuring an illegal plan for imposing word restrictions on judges. Following years of continuous communist attacks and unfair criticism of Supreme Court constitutionalist justices, specifically Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, this development comes as a result.
President Biden claims these “reforms” are important because “what is happening nowadays ( on the Supreme Court ) … affects the public’s trust in recent court choices” and has severely impacted “our personal rights”. In reality, the political left simply does n’t like that recent rulings have held up the Constitution’s limits on the power of government.
Biden’s duplicity on “personal rights” is most evident in the new disagrees by the judge’s left wing — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. All betrays a disregard for upholding the Constitution’s safeguards against a repressive central authorities and repressive lawyers.
The Securities and Exchange Commission alleged that investment director George Jarkesy Jr. and his expense advisory firm had engaged in funding fraud in SEC v. Jarkesy in which case the SEC referred to as Jarkesy. The SEC then prosecuted him in-house, not in a court of law, using an administrative law” judge” — an SEC employee — who, surprise, surprise, found Jarkesy guilty and imposed a$ 300, 000 fine.
Jarkesy objected to this treatment, alleging that the operational trial constituted a court of law violation of his Seventh Amendment straight to a jury trial. The six judges who are frequently being attacked by President Biden and the popular press all came to terms with the majority of the Supreme Court.
But Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson saw no trouble with, as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, the administrators in an administrative unit firm assuming the “roles of prosecutor, judge, and jurors”. The dissenters, said Roberts, may give the government the power” to prosecute citizens without a judge, without an impartial judge, and under procedures overseas to our courts”. It was to prevent such violations of “individual liberty” that the Constitution built “high walls and clear distinctions”.
In Sotomayor’s disturbing dissent, which was joined by Kagan and Jackson, she wrote she would knock down those high walls. Nothing in the Constitution, in her opinion, “requires the Government to seek civil penalties” in a case involving securities fraud before a jury in federal court.”
That view creates the foundation for a despotic government that can defraud its law enforcement authority to prosecute individuals without the protection of the law. It is a startling view of unchecked government power that Biden approves of having an impact on “personal freedoms.”
The same misguided view of government , is apparent in these justices ‘ dissent in , Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which tossed out the so-called Chevron doctrine. Chevron , was a regrettable 1984 decision in which the Supreme Court said courts should generally “defer” to federal agencies when interpreting the statutes those agencies administer, at least so long as the statute is “ambiguous” and the agency’s interpretation is reasonable, even if the court decides that it is not the best interpretation of the statute in question.
In other words, federal courts should not be in doubt about an agency’s permissive interpretation of the scope of its own authority if it was ever questioned about whether it had exceeded the authority granted to it by a federal statute. Over time, this resulted in federal bureaucrats having , carte blanche , to do almost anything they wanted.
It also stung in the wake of Chief Justice John Marshall’s well-known ruling in Marbury v. Madison, which stated that” the judicial department has the duty to express its own opinion” and that courts may not defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law because a statute is ambiguous.
Even though there is no provision in the authorizing statute that grants the National Marine Fisheries Service that power, Loper Bright asserted that it could impose on commercial fishermen that they must carry NMFS observers on their boats and that they must actually pay the observers ‘ salaries.
As Roberts said in the majority opinion, this deferral to federal agencies was a “fundamental disruption of our separation of powers” in the Constitution. The” Founders” hoped that” the courts would ] check the Executive by using the law’s proper interpretation.” The , Chevron , doctrine had stripped the” courts of judicial power by simultaneously increasing the power of executive agencies”.
Yet once again, the three dissenters, led this time by Kagan, saw nothing wrong with giving executive branch agencies such power. According to her, when Congress has “left an ambiguity or gap” in a statute, the courts should leave it up to the swarms of unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats to decide how much power they have, and how far they can go, to regulate the lives, professions, and property of the American public and their businesses.
Kagan saw nothing wrong with” sen]ding ] hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance”, to cite one of the complaints about the English monarchy in the Declaration of Independence.
Of course, one of the areas in which leftist justices are not interested in reducing government is when local governments attempt to clean up their cities and make parks and other public spaces safe for children and families. In a revealing dissent in , City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, Sotomayor, again joined by Kagan and Jackson, bizarrely argued that local ordinances against camping in public parks violate the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.
The Eighth Amendment was put into the Bill of Rights not to tie the hands of government officials trying to address a vexing problem, but to prevent, as Justice Neil Gorsuch points out in the majority opinion, “certain barbaric punishments like ‘ disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive.'” Anti-camping laws are a crucial component of resolving the nation’s numerous cities ‘ homeless problem. That includes places like San Francisco, which stated in its amicus brief that it has thousands of people sleeping in “tents and makeshift structures” in its public spaces.
According to Gorsuch, federal judges are the only way to solve the issue, and not through the democratic process. The Eighth Amendment “does not authorize federal judges to wrest those [democratic ] rights and obligations from the American people and in place impose this Nation’s homelessness policy.”
Under the guise of constitutional interpretation, the leftist bloc’s position would make judges super-legislators with veto power over local laws and ordinances they oppose. That is judicial activism, pure and simple. When Joe Biden asserts that the conservative appointees on the Supreme Court must defend democracy, they are preventing them from enshrine these kinds of unchecked government powers.
