Supreme Court Continues To Disregard Constitution And Strengthen Federal Leviathan

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – I’m going to walk you through a couple of the legal — these are very easy to understand — reasoning behind why the power to choose electors was left in the hands of the states, and why the Supreme Court erred mightily yesterday.  Justice Thomas points this out at the end of his dissent: What you guys are doing here, you are undermining and eroding the foundation of the constitutional system itself.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  The reason that you congregate together in May of 1787 and break your convention in September of 1787 and then go back to the states to try to ratify this thing called the Constitution, the reason this was done is so that the states would have an agent that would act on their behalf.  It would act on their behalf — I was actually reading this last night in Max Farrand’s records of the Federal Convention.  I actually read the entire report on the Committee of Detail.  The Committee of Detail was charged with taking all the ideas of the Federal Convention of 1787 and jotting them down into a form that could create a document like the Articles of Confederation that they would ultimately call the Constitution.  The Committee of Detail was charged with distilling the ideas and putting them all together, eschewing the ones that were not going to pass, concisely writing the ones that were going to be passed.

I also stumbled upon, as I was reading this last night, a wonderful passage from, I want to say it was James Wilson but there aren’t a lot of annotations on who wrote what.  I think it was Wilson who was the delegate from Pennsylvania.  Wilson said: Look, what we’ve got to do here is, not only do we have to write these ideas down and put them in some kind of order and divide them into clauses, we have to make this so that the average American person in 1787 could read it and understand it.  Let me repeat that.  The average person in 1787 that was literate could read it and understand it.  The Constitution and its language had to be so clear that it would not be confusing.

They knew they had a battle coming to try and get the thing ratified.  They knew that that was not going to be easy.  The only way they could possibly hope to achieve it and thus consummate the work of the summer of 1787 was to place the case in the Constitution itself in a manner so clear that anyone that read it would understand it.  Of course, even after those efforts, that’s not the way it happened, as we know from the acrimonious debate in Virginia over ratifying and how the Virginians, led by George Mason who was a the convention, and Patrick Henry who was not but was at the ratifying convention, of how they vigorously opposed ratifying, and we know why today.

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I’m going to walk you through a couple of the legal — these are very easy to understand — reasoning behind why the power to choose electors was left in the hands of the states, and why the Supreme Court erred mightily yesterday.  Justice Thomas points this out at the end of his dissent: What you guys are doing here, you are undermining and eroding the foundation of the constitutional system itself.  Even though he says he respectfully dissents — I’ll read it to you.  The final part of Thomas’s dissent is — he’s talking about this commission that Congress formed, which doesn’t even meet anymore…

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Scalia and company referring it, just send this case back to the EAC, get a new ruling from them, try to make it comport with your new silly law in Arizona, you idiots that want IDs for federal elections, even though your mighty federal overlords have told you that you’re not allowed to require such things, just go back to the EAC.  Isn’t that funny, go back to an acronym.  Yeah, go back to this agency that never should have been created to start with and go get another permission slip, a hall pass so you can have your silly elections in Arizona.  As Thomas points out: Justice Scalia, the EAC doesn’t exist, dude.  It’s not there.  There’s no EAC to go back to.  This is what Thomas points out in his dissent.

[reading]

Justice Alito is correct to point out that the majority’s reliance on the EAC is meaningless because the EAC has no members and no current prospects of new members.  Offering a nonexistent pathway to administration relief is an exercise in futility, not constitutional avoidance.

Even if the EAC were a going concern instead of an empty shell, I disagree with the majority’s application of the constitutional avoidance canon.  I would not require Arizona to seek approval for its registration requirements from the Federal Government, for, as I have shown, the Federal Government does not have the constitutional authority to withhold such approval.  Accordingly, it does not have the authority to command States to seek it.  As a result, the majority’s proposed solution does little to avoid the serious constitutional problems created by its interpretation.

[end reading]

Mike:  In other words, they’ve opened up yet another can of worms.  You can’t even now determine how your elections are held in your state or your county or your city without going first to some body that Congress creates on your hands and knees and begging for their blessing.  This is federalism?  Puh-freaking-lease.  Then he concludes:

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[reading]

Instead of adopting respondents’ definition of “accept and use” and offering Arizona the dubious recourse of bringing an APA challenge within the NVRA [Mike: That’s the National Voting Rights Act.] framework, I would adopt an interpretation of §1973gg–4(a)(1) that avoids the constitutional problems with respondents’ interpretation. The States, not the Federal Government, have the exclusive right to define the “Qualifications requisite for Electors,” U. S. Const., Art. I, §2, cl. 1, which includes the corresponding power to verify that those qualifications have been met. I would, therefore, hold that Arizona may “reject any application for registration that is not accompanied by satisfactory evidence of United States citizenship,” as defined by Arizona law. Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §16–166(F).

I respectfully dissent.

[end reading]

Mike:  And right he is.  It seems to not matter.  It does not matter any longer.  If we’re not going to adhere to the original language, intent, spirit, ratified intent of the Constitution and the amendments thereto, then what do we need it for?  These people out there running around about, [mocking] “I wish we could return to constitutionalism.”  Well, if you’re going to have constitutionalism defined by the Supreme Court of the United States, the irony is you’re not going to have constitutionalism.  The reason you have a written constitution is so that there are not arguments and misunderstandings over what is permissible and what is not.  There is a clear barrier line between the powers exercised by those that are parties to the compact, which are the states, and the powers exercised by their agent, which is the federal government.

If you think of it in terms as the states hiring an extracurricular body, call it the federal government, to act on their behalf in very certain, very rare, very limited, and very well-defined instances, what we have today is the exact polar opposite.  We have the federal government and its judiciary acting as the sovereign body, ordering and kicking about the residents of the states and the acts of the state legislatures, then telling them when they may exercise an authority and when they may not, and then telling them when that exercise is “constitutional” or is not.  The exact opposite of the spirit and letter of the reason why there is a written constitution to start with.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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