Once and likely future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee may have been the last speaker at the recent “March for Marriage,” but what he had to say made the most lasting impression. For it was the winsome Huckabee, whom his detractors believe is “too nice” to take on the Left, who took on a fight even the boldest conservatives have shied away from for far too long.
“Judicial supremacy is a curse upon this great republic and is the greatest heresy of our time,” Huckabee said.
He went on to say the executive and legislative branches are not required to impose every violation of “natural law,” no matter what “nine people in black robes” decree.
Regardless of whether you like or dislike the idea of Huckabee 2016, every single word he said is true. And until we take his words to heart and act upon them, we cannot undo the damage the cultural Marxists have done to our constitutional republic.
Imagine trying to win a war without dismantling your enemy’s most fearsome and effective weapon. The odds for ultimate victory would be slim, for every gain you make would be eradicated every time your adversary unleashed this weapon. Yet this is exactly what we’ve been trying to do against the Left for at least a generation.
Come now, let us reason together. We’re all friends here. Can we be honest with one another? Can we be the critical thinkers we claim to be? Good. Then I’d like to pose a few questions for us to ponder.
Despite the fact we’ve sold a lot of books and gotten a lot of people elected to office, how come our movement has almost no substantive domestic policy victories to speak of? How come the Reagan era was the zenith of our movement, and not its vanguard? How come we conquered statism in the Soviet Union, but have barely stunted its growth in our own country?
There are several uncomfortable answers to these questions, but undoubtedly one of them is certainly our unwillingness to confront the most potent weapon the Left uses against us over and over again. A weapon they have put in place so they could unravel the intent and foundation of our constitutional republic without risking the scrutiny of the voters. This way they could impose “pretend laws” on a defenseless citizenry that would never see the light of the day if they had to pass lawfully.
I’m referring to judicial supremacy, which is really just a tyrannical oligarchy by another name. The federal judiciary has become America’s Politburo, where elites gather to impose pagan morality and anti-constitutional injustice on what’s supposed to be a free people. The notion that the judicial branch is superior to all the other branches flies in the face of what our Founding Fathers intended, and is one of the statists’ most pernicious lies.
Indeed, the framers explicitly said from the outset this was not the intent of an independent judicial branch.
In “The Federalist No. 78,” Alexander Hamilton writes: “The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither force nor will, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments. This simple view of the matter suggests several important consequences. It proves incontestably, that the judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power.”
Thomas Jefferson had much to say about potential tyranny from the judicial branch. He said “the question whether the judges are invested with exclusive authority to decide on the constitutionality of a law” is answered in the Constitution itself. “Certainly there is not a word in the Constitution which has given that power to them more than to the Executive or Legislative branches,” Jefferson said.
Furthermore, Jefferson believed “to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
I could quote multiple Founding Fathers who had similar things to say about tyranny from the judicial branch. But I specifically quoted Hamilton and Jefferson, who were often at odds, to demonstrate how widespread the opposition to judicial supremacy was from the men who pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honors” to give us American Exceptionalism.
To our founders, an independent judiciary did not mean independent of the will of the people, as today’s statists attest. It meant independent of the potential despotism of the other branches. They had just rebelled against a monarchy in England that controlled the judiciary and used it to impose its own twisted view of justice, which is what the Left has been doing to our liberty for decades now.
In fact, there is not a single gain the Left has made in this past generation that wasn’t either aided and abetted by the judiciary, or unilaterally imposed by the judiciary. Here are just a few examples:
⦁ State-sanctioned child-killing (Roe v. Wade)
⦁ Private property rights attacked (Kelo v. New London)
⦁ Obamacare mandate/tax upheld (NFIB v. Sebelius)
⦁ Illegal aliens entitled to taxpayer-funded benefits (Plyler v. Doe)
⦁ Redefining marriage (Lawrence v. Texas)
⦁ Opening the floodgates against religious liberty and free speech (U.S. v. Windsor)
Plus, in two recent opinions (D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago) only a scant 5-4 majority on the U.S. Supreme Court still found the Second Amendment to the Constitution constitutional. Imagine if the vote in those landmark cases had been 5-4 the other way? Does that mean we all just turn in our guns? Are we not even going to stand up to these black-robed bullies when they outright disregard the Constitution?
Our rights come from God, not government. Therefore, what government has not given, it cannot take away regardless of the words of mere mortals. Our Founding Fathers did not fight a revolution so that we would be ruled by laws made by people we did not elect. But that’s exactly the anti-American scheme we have allowed the Left to use against us for a generation. We have “evolved” beyond judicial review to judicial overview, with all laws passed by our elected officials not official until they’ve been given the Betty Crocker seal of approval from unelected judges.
That is tyranny.
I don’t care how high someone scores on your favorite conservative group’s scorecard on the issues: If they aren’t prepared to echo the words of Huckabee, they are going to have a very hard time advancing liberty. The Left has their pagan judges at the ready to nullify any serious attempt we make at either the federal or state level to roll back their attacks against our freedom. It is impossible to restore our constitutional republic without first restoring the constitutional system of checks and balances, and the separation of powers.
We need an articulate champion to make this case to the American people, and a national election in 2016 is the perfect platform for it. Perhaps Huckabee is that champion? I hope he’s not alone. Many of those who will vote in the 2016 Iowa Caucuses also voted in 2010 to oust three (now former) state Supreme Court justices who thought they were above the will of the people. These voters are looking for bold fighters, and this is a fight that separates the men from the boys.
(Steve Deace is a nationally-syndicated talk show host and the author of “Rules for Patriots: How Conservatives Can Win Again.” You can follow him on Twitter @SteveDeaceShow.)
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