Schizophrenic SCOTUS Moves on Doctrine
The Constitution of the United States is there to protect the People from the Government
Prescott, AZ June 28, 2024… With so much breaking loose this week, this post is going to be a long one. With the movement of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) moving back to the center from the left-of-center Court it was pre-Trump, some of the anti-freedom doctrine ground once lost has been regained. SCOTUS delivered three pivotal opinions this week, perhaps one of the most important of them to all Americans —Chevron Deference— today.
First, I must set the context of why these SCOTUS moves on doctrine are watershed moments in history, and demonstrate the significance of elections. We hear the term civil rights but not enough people know what the term embodies. This is mainly due to the breakdown in our public education system and the failure of most public schools to teach old-school “civics and government.” Too few high school students and young adults understand what the term means and where such rights come from. Understanding the meaning and the source is critical to a free and secure nation.
Secular America cannot reconcile the source of our rights with their godless worldview. Our civil rights are for the most part memorialized in the Bill of Rights and do not come from the government. The framers of our Constitution were crystal clear in their acknowledgment that our civil rights do not come from man, lest they be taken away by man.
The Declaration of Independence sets forth the foundational premise, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
God is the Creator and author of natural rights in this formulation. Since rights are from a higher authority, no earthly power can violate an individual’s inherent rights. Interestingly, God here acts as a supreme legislator who makes the natural law and grants natural rights.1
The Constitution is a highly ordered document…
It cannot be emphasized enough that the first three articles of the Constitution are in order of power. First on the list is the Legislative Branch, mainly because the elected representation is the closest to the People in the smallest denomination in a representative republic, namely Congressional Districts (CD). The CDs are still a big number, with the number of voting seats in the House of Representatives currently set at 435, with each one representing an average of 761,169 people following the 2020 United States census. The Legislative Branch allegedly takes the will of the People and memorializes it into law.
Next in the hierarchy of the power structure comes the Executive Branch, which is responsible for effectuating, that is carrying out the will of the People memorialized in law. It is control over “police powers” which the Legislative Branch does not have. The Executive, also known as the Chief Magistrate, is restrained by the “power of the purse” held by the Legislative Branch. This is an example of checks and balances. The progressive notion of co-equal branches of government, promoted by those seeking to grow the administrative state is a fantasy. “Until Watergate, the notion that the three branches of government were coequal was considered far-fetched. This coequal doctrine was largely an effort by the Nixon administration to keep congressional investigators at bay.”2
The last, and least powerful in the hierarchy of power is the Judicial Branch, the courts. The Courts are little more than a referee, giving guidance on how to apply the law when there is a disagreement between the Legislative and Executive Branches, or between the People. If it were not so, their publications would not be called opinions. Whether they are binding on the Legislature or the Executive is up to both since the Judicial Branch has no power to enforce.
The same concept of order is manifest in the Bill of Rights…
In the Bill of Rights, the First Amendment memorializes the natural right of individual franchise and freedom of thought as well as its outward communication.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
While the remainder of the ten earliest rights memorialized in the Bill of Rights are each important, their order is the point here. The most important is the freedom of speech, and the restraint on the government to control it. It is not simply about religion, the press, or the right of the people to assemble, it is about restraints on the government to interfere or to restrict.
There are three landmark cases that the Court delivered opinions on this past week. First is the Free Speech and Government Action case, then there is the J6 Misapplication of Law case, and finally the end of the 40-year precedent of unchecked administrative state case known as Chevron Difference. Every one of these cases impacts Americans at an individual level.
Free Speech and Government Action against it…
This is why the just-released opinion of SCOTUS is embarrassingly wrong at its core. From the opinion on the case MURTHY, SURGEON GENERAL, ET AL. v. MISSOURI ET AL., “In 2020, with the outbreak of COVID–19, the platforms announced that they would enforce these policies against users who post false or misleading content about the pandemic. The platforms also applied misinformation policies during the 2020 election season. During that period, various federal officials regularly spoke with the platforms about COVID–19 and election-related misinformation. For example, White House officials publicly and privately called on the platforms to do more to address vaccine misinformation. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a health advisory that encouraged the platforms to take steps to prevent COVID–19 misinformation “from taking hold.”3
We now know that most of the “misinformation” that the government sought to suppress was in fact correct and would have saved scores of lives if only the flow of free speech had not been restricted by the government calling upon the social media “cutouts” to act on behalf of the government. Indeed, we now know that government agencies like the CDC were engaged in a protective cover for Big Pharma peddling “vaccines” that were not vaccines at all, but untried and unreliable injections that did not deliver on the promises to “prevent the spread of the so-called disease.”
The opinion dealt with “standing,” which is not law, but a doctrine laid down by the
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