John Roberts is arguably Donald Trump’s Roy Cohn. When the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court declined to preside over the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Roberts set the stage for our grand experiment’s next and perhaps its final chapter. The insurrectionists have learned how to gain access in true Goebbelsian fashion.

It was Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s Minister of Propaganda, who wrote the playbook for the coarse threaded wing-nuts in government today. He said:

“We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear’s work, that is its affair. We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As the wolf bursts into the flock, so we come.”

Like the apprentice demon C.S. Lewis wrote about in the Screwtape Letters, Roberts and his cohorts are methodically corroding the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic. Other Goebbelsian tactics; including lie often enough, specify the targets for hatred, and accuse the other of that which you are guilty, are now standard features within the cesspool of disinformation the Roberts Court has itself created.

As long as dark money funds judicial nominations, confirmations, and accommodations, the Court will do the bidding of those operating in the shadows and to whom the consent of the governed has always been seen as an arcane, banished idea. Opposing forces have now largely given way to those who think making America great again means returning us to the good old days of teenage breeding wenches, peonage, and involuntary servitude.

The witch trial jurisprudence of Dobbs, and the way the Court became a primary enabler of murder and mayhem through decisions in Bruen and now Cargill, demonstrates its contempt for the public interest. High sounding words no longer mask the depraved heart indifference some SCOTUS justices have shown towards young women not ready for parenthood and children trying to avoid having their faces homogenized by a 45 round-per-minute gun never envisioned by those who ratified the Second Amendment.

In trying to identify the corrosive influences within our country, the public is focusing on certain individuals that should have never occupied positions of honor and trust within the judiciary. For the authors of Opinions that advance a moral inversion agenda, there is not a trace of statesmanship discernible. And now they have opened the door for a deluge of cases that will address all the new ambiguities, even the incumbents acknowledge more Justices will be needed to avoid interrupting their island hopping and book tour schedules.

The United States Constitution provides that the President “shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint…judges of the Supreme Court….” After Senate confirmation, the President signs a commission appointing the nominee, who then must take two oaths before executing the duties of the office. These oaths the Constitutional Oath and the Judicial Oath.

When on September the 10^th in 2022, Chief Justice John Roberts admitted he doesn’t “understand the connection between opinions that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the Court,” he displayed or feigned a clear lack of situational awareness that is, in itself, problematic.

It certainly was not lost on the public how one presidential candidate could lose the popular vote in 2016 by 2.9 million votes and then, as President go on to pack the Supreme Court with three agenda-driven justices. And while the electorate is resigned to the fact we must, for the time being, live with an Electoral College scheme that might have made sense in the days of the Pony Express, we also understand how the corrupted nomination and confirmation process was foisted upon us by means of dark moneyed Senatorial, Judicial, and Media sophistries.

Dark money politics is not only owned by the Court that condoned it, some SCOTUS Justices are also among its greatest beneficiaries. Even so, the most concerning aspects of what has been exposed, as unjust enrichment, is the way certain members of the Court seem to be delivering victories for their benefactors. In the absence of even the usual revisionist historical analogues, it is now the bump-stock and gun manufacturers that are receiving a tremendous amount of return on investment.

Just how much blood money is required to convert a sitting SCOTUS justice into an enabler of murder and mayhem has recently become less of a mystery. And, the jury in the Court of Public Opinion is still out. As Chief Justice Roberts shrinks away from so many of his responsibilities, while he shirked his duty to preside over a president’s second impeachment trial that was more about disqualification from holding future office than it was about the removal question that had been rendered moot. As Roberts failed in his responsibility, to create meaningful judicial ethics reform, it is no wonder he has difficulty grappling with questions about his Court’s legitimacy.

If such cowardly avoidance was confined to the office of Chief Justice, it would certainly be bad enough. But the Judicial Conference of the United States is the national policymaking body for the federal courts. It too has been lackadaisical with respect to the pressing need for meaningful reform.

Principle #1 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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On September the 10^th in 2022, John Roberts, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court said:

“Obviously people can say what they want. And they’re certainly free to criticize the Supreme Court. And if they want to say that its legitimacy is in question they’re free to do so but I don’t understand the connection between opinions that people disagree with and the legitimacy of the Court.”

The Declaration of Independence incorporated a doctrine first articulated as “the consent of the governed” by John Duns Scotus in his Lectura and Ordinatio of the 1290s. That phrasing, adopted unanimously by the 56 delegates to the Second Continental Congress on July the 4^th in 1776, was an unambiguous acknowledgment of the new nation’s cardinal precepts. Their expanded phrasing further defined government’s legitimacy. The Declaration stated that “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

On the United States Court’s website we find the following statement: “Establish Justice is the first of five objectives outlined in the 52-word paragraph that the Framers drafted in six weeks during the hot Philadelphia summer of 1787.” In fact, the words: “in Order to form a more perfect Union” precede “Establish Justice” and any literate person would reasonably infer that the forming of such a union is a clearly stated objective. In fact, there are seven objectives advanced through the Preamble.

The United State’s Constitution’s first three words “We the People” are also a clear indication that the consent of the governed was foremost in the minds of the framers, that any and all of government’s legitimate functions are clearly derived therefrom. The Preamble is the Enacting Clause. The expressed intent, that the nation was to be formed by We the People, is widely understood to be a clearly defined objective.

The citizenry is ultimately responsible for insuring the faithful interpretation of The Constitution’s Mission Statement, its Defining Objectives, and its Guiding Principles. Implicit to the statement “We the People of the United States” is that we are the stewards of a Constitution that is designed to facilitate the formation of a unified nation. It is much, much more than a treaty between separate sovereign states.

Understanding this constitutional imperative is first among the most basic qualifications for anyone holding a position of honor and trust on the United States Supreme Court or elsewhere in government. The Enacting Clause of the Constitution has been targeted by malign actors throughout the history of the United States. They have persuaded the Judiciary to rule that it is to have no operative effect. And, We the People never, ever consented to that!

Principle #2 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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Abraham Lincoln steadfastly believed that the Constitution should be interpreted in a manner that is faithful to its purposes. Today, the legacy of Lincoln stands as an inspiring example against the pernicious sophistries of those who seek to undermine what John Wycliffe described in the Preface to his translation of the Latin Vulgate into Middle English. He wrote: “The Bible is for government of, by and for the people.” Lincoln later expressed the hope, shared by all people of authentic good will, that such an evolved form of government “shall not perish from the earth.”

The Constitution is a contract with the people of the United States. In 1819, then Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court John Marshall wrote an Opinion in the case Sturges versus Crowninshield. It was a case involving a federal question about the obligations of contract and the extent to which such obligations might be discharged as a result of insolvency or bankruptcy.

Marshall referred to controversies about the Contract Clause when he wrote:

“Before discussing this argument, it may not be improper to premise that although the spirit of an instrument, especially of a constitution, is to be respected not less than its letter, yet the spirit is to be collected chiefly from its words. It would be dangerous in the extreme to infer from extrinsic circumstances that a case for which the words of an instrument expressly provide shall be exempted from its operation.”

Eighty-six years later Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan blunted the spirit of the law, and its operational effect, when he wrote the opinion in Jacobson versus Massachusetts.

Harlan acknowledged the prior work of Marshall with out-of-context phrasing when he wrote: 

“While the spirit of the Constitution is to be respected not less than its letter, the spirit is to be collected chiefly from its words.”

But then he quashed the essence of the Enacting Clause, effectively excising and excavating under it, when he wrote: 

“The United States does not derive any of its substantive powers from the Preamble of the Constitution. It cannot exert any power to secure the declared objects of the Constitution unless, apart from the Preamble, such power be found in, or can properly be implied from, some express delegation in the instrument.”

Harlan’s personal confusion concerning the difference between inference and implication notwithstanding, this was also the time of the Fuller Court. Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller and his cohorts in 1905 were consistently expressing contempt for, the Ninth Amendment which clearly states:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Principle #3 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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Melville W. Fuller was the first Chief Justice to lobby Congress. He successfully advocated for the adoption of the Circuit Courts of Appeals Act of 1891. It established appellate courts, which reduced the Supreme Court’s backlog and allowed it to decide cases in a more timely manner. In 1893, President Grover Cleveland offered to appoint Fuller to be Secretary of State.  He declined, contending that accepting a political appointment would harm the Supreme Court’s reputation for impartiality.

Many legal scholars have argued that Fuller, who served from 1888 until his death in 1910, was overly deferential to business interests and those of the wealthy. Prior to his service as Chief Justice, he vehemently opposed the policies of President Abraham Lincoln. He helped develop a gerrymandered system for congressional apportionment, corroding the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic.

Fuller supported barring African-Americans from voting or settling in Illinois. He spoke in opposition to the Emancipation Proclamation and he worked to prevent the federal government from outlawing slavery, thereby impairing the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness for those who were actively building the nation. While serving as Chief Justice, he placed the Court’s imprimatur on Jim Crow laws with Plessy. The Fuller Court also rejected a challenge to poll taxes and literacy tests that effectively disenfranchised Mississippi’s African-American population.

Fuller was instrumental in setting equal justice under law squarely onto a plane of unreality as he worked to maintain the two tiered justice system. In 2021, the commissioners of Kennebec County, Maine voted unanimously to remove a statue of Fuller from public land with the aim of dissociating the county from racial segregation.

In Lochner v. New York, Fuller agreed with the majority that the Constitution forbade states from enforcing wage-and-hour restrictions on businesses. The 1905 case involved a New York law that capped hours for bakery workers at sixty per week. In a decision widely viewed to be among the Supreme Court’s worst, a five-justice majority held the law to be unconstitutional under the Due Process Clause. The opinion, written by Justice Rufus W. Peckham and joined by Fuller, maintained that the liberty protected by that clause included a right to enter labor contracts without being subject to unreasonable governmental regulation.  Peckham rejected the state’s argument that the law was intended to protect workers’ health, citing the “common understanding” that baking was not unhealthy.  He maintained that bakers could protect their own health, arguing that the law was in fact a labor regulation in disguise. Most scholars believe that the majority in Lochner engaged in judicial activism, substituting their own views for those within the democratically elected branches of government.

Principle #4 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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In the Majority Supreme Court Opinion on New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, Justice Thomas wrote “. . . when it comes to interpreting the Constitution, not all history is created equal. Constitutional rights are enshrined with the scope they were understood to have when the people adopted them.”

Justice Breyer, in his Dissenting Opinion, recalled points he raised earlier in the Heller case wherein he proposed weighing “the interests protected by the Second Amendment on one side and the governmental public-safety concerns on the other.”

Breyer wrote:

The tradition of regulations restricting public carriage of firearms, inherited from England and adopted by the Colonies, continued into the founding era. Virginia, for example, enacted a law in 1786 that, like the Statute of Northampton, prohibited any person from “go[ing] nor rid[ing] armed by night nor by day, in fairs or markets, or in other places, in terror of the Country.”

Public-carry restrictions proliferated after the Second Amendment’s ratification. Just one year later North Carolina enacted a law with language lifted from the Statute of Northampton. And, other States passed similar laws in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries.

Thomas had opined that the Statute of Northampton “has little bearing on the Second Amendment,” in part because it was “enacted . . . more than 450 years before the ratification of the Constitution.” Breyer highlighted the fact that the statute remained in force for hundreds of years, well into the 18^th century. It included this: “The offence of riding or going armed, with dangerous or unusual weapons, is a crime against the public peace, by terrifying the good people of the land; . . ”

With respect to the Court’s inclination towards selective amplification, filtration and contextualization, Breyer warned of a one way ratchet and preordained conclusions. He asked: “ . . . will the Court’s approach permit judges to reach the outcomes they prefer and then cloak those outcomes in the language of history?” He also wrote:

In each instance, the Court finds a reason to discount the historical evidence’s persuasive force. Some of the laws New York has identified are too old. But others are too recent. Still others did not last long enough. Some applied to too few people. Some were enacted for the wrong reasons. Some may have been based on a constitutional rationale that is now impossible to identify. Some arose in historically unique circumstances. And some are not sufficiently analogous to the licensing regime at issue here.

Justice Breyer warned that such thinking would make it nearly impossible to sustain common-sense regulations necessary for our nation’s safety and security. Indeed, the Court has become the great enabler and facilitator of murder and mayhem.

Principle #5 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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George Washington, in his Farewell Address, said: “Political parties may now and then answer popular ends, but they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government”.

The dark money sophistries that support judicial nominations, confirmations, and featherbedded accommodations appear to dovetail precisely with President Washington’s prophetic wisdom. The Court has cloaked itself with an absolute judicial immunity that has no foundation within the Constitution of the United States. It is, rather, a doctrine derived from the supposed infallibility of Popes and Kings. And now, certain members of the Federal Judiciary are clearly enamored with the Unitary Executive Theory.

In 2008, law professors Steven Calabresi and Christopher Yoo described the unitary executive theory as ensuring “the federal government will execute the law in a consistent manner and in accordance with the president’s wishes.” This stands in stark contrast and striking relief against other scholarly literature, such as MacKenzie in 2008, and Crouch, Rozell, and Sollenberger in 2020, stressing the fact that federal employees must faithfully execute the laws enacted according to the process prescribed in the U.S. Constitution.

Former White House Counsel John Dean warned: “In its most extreme form, unitary executive theory can mean that neither Congress nor the federal courts can tell the President what to do or how to do it . . .”

As the Supreme Court of the United States vacillates between a secularization hypothesis and quasi-theocratic rule, its moral and legal relativism is widely seen as the inevitable result of abandoning the principles articulated within the Constitution’s Preamble. The public is asking: “What ever became of your Oath?

In the United States, federal judges are required to take two oaths, the Judicial Oath and the Constitutional Oath. The first commits the decision maker to administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich. The second requires them to  support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. A comprehensive understanding of defense is far more than what the military – industrial complex would have us believe.

Most individuals, who reside at the Sentient Center, believe totalitarian wannabes are a clear and present danger to the principles enshrined within the United States Constitution. And they see the Supreme Court’s enabling of such individuals as antithetical to constitutional principle. If the Court’s biases were grounded in truth, or the cardinal precepts delineated in the Preamble, its desire to be seen as legitimate would be respected.

Principle #6 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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With its Decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court has both enabled and facilitated clear Deprivations of Rights under the Color of Law. The Thirteenth Amendment, in Section 1 is unambiguous with the statement “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Title 18 of The United States Code in Chapter 77 at §1581 further underscores the Supreme folly with respect to forced labor. That statute reads: “Whoever holds or returns any person to a condition of peonage, or arrests any person with the intent of placing him in or returning him to a condition of peonage, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both.”

Women and girls that are not ready to take on the responsibilities of parenthood, are routinely coerced into such forced labor conditions at the pleasure of the state. Malign state actors enjoy whispered impunities through a wide variety of unconstitutional immunities as they violate health privacy rights even while using the long arm of the law to seize women’s health records. Although the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) specifically exempts law enforcement investigations from adhering to such privacy requirements, if those investigations were conducted in bad faith, bad actors could and should be subject to fines of between fifty thousand to two-hundred and fifty thousand dollars and serve up to ten years in prison.

The witch trial jurisprudence employed by the majority in Dobbs reflects an abysmal ignorance, not only with respect to the Thirteenth Amendment, but also the Establishment Clause. While it was respecting one establishment of religion, the Court discounted the way Judaism prioritizes the health and welfare interests of the mother over the unborn. It fully vested its reputation with those fundamentalist Christian sects that have allowed their hop-skippety-jump interpretations of the Word made book to eclipse the actual teachings of the Word made flesh. When Jesus said “I stand at the door and knock,” he was demonstrating a profound respect for individual sovereignty. This particular lesson is apparently lost on those feigning reverence for small government.

Equal justice under law is no longer seen as an aspirational statement within the judicial monastery. Government of, by, and for the people has been undermined by decisions on voting rights, political and racial gerrymandering, the purging of voter roles without documentary evidence of death or relocation, and all the other self-serving sophistries dark money brings to bear in distorting the public discourse. Where are democracy’s true friends?

Principle #7 from the Enacting Clause (Preamble) of the United States Constitution

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If one would be required to sign an Informed Consent document to have a mole removed, how could the Consent of the Governed be legally undermined through the deceptive practices of prevaricating politicians that routinely target the voting public with misleading statements?

The abandonment of principle that has led to its surreptitious betrayal with respect to the Doctrine of Original Intention makes the ‘originalist’ Justices look like walking contradictions. Their efforts, to undermine government of, by, and for the people, are obvious to anyone who values objective satisfaction over subjective gratification.

In the United States of America the Supreme Court represents what has been described as an independent judiciary although it is clearly a product of political process. It should be clear by now that an integrity compromised process yields an integrity compromised product. The Court has, through its decisions, converted what media analyst Marshall McLuhan once described as a whirlpool of information, into a cesspool of disinformation. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, Justice Sotomayor questioned whether the Court could even survive the stench.

In 1976, The Supreme Court ruled certain limits on campaign expenditures to be unconstitutional. That case was Buckley versus Valeo. In 1978, SCOTUS heard First National Bank of Boston versus Bellotti and held that corporations have a First Amendment right to make contributions to ballot initiative campaigns. The 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) case marked the turning point when dark money contributions surged distorting the political discourse.

The same political gamesmanship that would allow one President to fill one third of the Supreme Court positions in just one term is now replete with dark money nominations, confirmations, and accommodations. Today, dark money is all pervasive and the Supreme Court Justices are among its greatest beneficiaries. From the endowments that influence law school curricula, through a variety of peer pressure societies, and the undeniable process sophistries; the Justices have not only enabled deceptive practices, some have personally benefited from them.

The acrid influence of partisans continues to corrode the democracy underpinnings of our constitutional republic. The only way to minimize the influence of those lying in wait for the Court’s ideological balance to shift, is to change its critical mass.

Expanding the Court to twenty-one Justices would make it possible to impanel seven Justices at random, to hear each given case. The Court could rule on a more timely basis in cases where the national interest is at stake. It would serve to reduce the backlog of unsettled law. And, it could help a great humanity to catch an occasional glimpse of statesmanship when they look at how the individual Justices behave.

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