Is there still time to pull our democratic republic out of the nose dive that John Roberts and the other wackadoodle wing-nuts on the Supreme Court have accelerated? The short answer is ‘yes.’ But, in order to do that, the general public will have to get real focused real fast. This requires at least a basic understanding of the various forces at play.
To move onward and upward, we must be deliberate as we work to counteract certain retardant forces including the drag on progress and gravity of each given situation. And, as any aviator will tell you, our progress can be ‘stalled’ when the forces favoring forward momentum and lift are, in some way, interrupted. Student pilots spend hours rehearsing stall recovery. They to need develop a quick response for use in those dire situations when a finely crafted wing simply stops working, especially when there’s very little space between them and the dirt. After all, if one is going to fall from high places, it’s especially embarrassing to do it tail first.
Like the student practicing stall recovery, citizens who want to “secure the blessing of liberty for ourselves and our posterity,” need to develop a quick response to every conceivable threat. And, these desirable traits, when skillfully honed, are best understood by analogy to a conditioned spiritual reflex.
On the 22nd of March in 1775, Edmund Burke gave a speech titled On Conciliation with the Colonies. In that talk, Burke highlighted such a ‘reflex’ when, with reference to the Colonists, he offered the following observations:
“The smartness of debate will say, that this knowledge ought to teach them more clearly the rights of legislature, their obligations to obedience, and the penalties of rebellion. All this is mighty well. But my honourable and learned friend on the floor, who condescends to mark what I say for animadversion, will disdain that ground. He has heard, as well as I, that when great honours and great emoluments do not win over this knowledge to the service of the state, it is a formidable adversary to government. If the spirit be not tamed and broken by these happy methods, it is stubborn and litigious.
Abeunt studia in mores: This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in attack, ready in defence, full of resources. In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and snuff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.“
Our contemporaries would do well to channel at least some of the qualities Burke attributes to the Colonists. Like the pilot in the stalled plane, we must quickly make some attitudinal changes if our country is ever going to rise again and move onward and upward, from one level of attainment to the next.
This metaphor can also be comfortably extended into questions of balance. For when a load is too far aft of the center of gravity, it can make stall recovery well neigh impossible. Of course if the engine is strong enough one may be able to compensate for unintelligent loading, but at great expense in terms of energy generation and consumption.
It is within this question of balance that we must consider whether the Supreme Court’s is displaying an abysmal ignorance or an intentional sacrifice of checks and balances on the altar that have now fetishized as the separation of powers. Their contempt for the seven principles originally advanced, through the Enacting Clause of the United States Constitution, is now on full display. The coarse threaded wing-nuts on the Court today stand, in stark contrast and striking relief, against a backdrop of Declarative and Constitutional Principle. For life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness has now fallen by the wayside as the wayward Justices indulge their insatiable appetites for more and more power.
Through their witch trial jurisprudence, they have selected historical analogues that favor bump-stocks and high capacity magazines over any authentic ‘pro-life’ agenda. They have enabled violations of the Thirteenth Amendment as they force females, who are not ready for parenthood or to bear children for someone else, into conditions of peonage and involuntary servitude at the pleasure of certain backwards governors and legislators within the states.
When one considers the first three words of the Constitution, ‘We the People’ was never meant to include women, persons of color, or anyone else that didn’t own land. As with the engraving “Equal Justice Under Law” displayed over the doors to the Supreme Court building, the Roberts Court is perpetrating a fraud on the People of the United States with its originalism and textualism schtick.
The forming of a more perfect union is hardly an ideal for those on the Court who seek to divide us even on consensus issues. An undercover documentary filmmaker, Lauren Windsor at the Supreme Court Historical Society’s Annual Dinner on June the 3rd in 2024, told Sam Alito that she doesn’t think negotiation with the left is possible if polarization in the country is going to end, but rather it’s a matter of “winning.”
She recorded Alito’s response wherein he said: “On one side or the other — one side or the other is going to win,” he said. “I don’t know. I mean, there can be a way of working — a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult, you know, because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised. So it’s not like you are going to split the difference.”
Thus far the Court has compromised what is meant by each of the seven objectives within the Enacting Clause of the United States Constitution.