One of the news/information gateways that I use to keep my pulse on American news and culture had a link this morning to an article explaining the doings of Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker. It seems the redoubtable Justice Parker has had the temerity to challenge rulings from the SCOTUS due to their reliance on international law in their decisions. Particularly Judge Parker is ripped over the 2005 SCOTUS Roper vs. Simmons ruling since the effect of that ruling, which tossed out the death penalty for inmates who were under 18 at the time of their crimes, led to the cancellation of an appointment of a Alabama Murderer with his rendevous with the sword. This was a man who Judge Parker helped prosecute before being elected to Alabama's high court.
Judge Parker is effectively calling for State Supreme Courts to practice judicial nullification of Federal Supreme Court rulings that are in clear violation of the US Constitution. Such a practice, if implemented, would both eviscerate the authority of the Supreme Court, while playing havoc with the jurisprudential uniformity that unites the States into a cohesive national whole.
One couldn't hope for a better man to be challenging the powers that be. I have met Judge Tom Parker and he is no wild-eyed frenetic madman. Quite to the contrary you could never hope to meet a more mild, humble, self-effacing man than Judge Tom Parker.
Judge Parker's call for judicial nullification has the salutary effect of reminding us once again that this nation, as founded, was to be ruled by laws and not men, and further that the law that Americans are to be ruled by is a US Constitution that has a stable meaning, and NOT a US Constitution, the meaning of which, is determined by ever evolving case precedent with no or marginally tenuous connections to the original document -- precedents that apparently now can be augmented with alien legal concepts coming to us from outside the American Constitutional and Historical context.
Judge Parker, God bless him, has forgotten the way the game is supposed to be played. The way the game is currently set up is that all judges save those on the US Supreme Court are to bow and scrape to the infinite wisdom of SCOTUS by applying their rulings without question, even should the decisions be manifestly unconstitutional. In the current game the only time a judge has the absolute freedom to determine the meaning of the Constitution is when he becomes a judge on the Supreme Court of these United States. In such a move he goes from demi-god status and is invested with full godhood.
Judge Parker's quaint insistence that the gods must comply with something above them (i.e.- The US Constitution) is considered tantamount to legal heresy by the legal beagle class. One such example of one crying 'heresy' is Bryan Stevenson, director of the Equal Justice Initiative, which represents indigent defendants and prisoners in Alabama. Stevenson says,
"There is fear that Parker will not follow Supreme Court precedents," and observes that "Judges express dissent or disapproval all the time, but they apply decisions they do not agree with. The idea that a judge can refuse to follow a decision he does not like seems to be the very definition of the kind of judicial activism he criticizes."
Now, with this quote, Stevenson does us the favor of forcing us to ask what is the nature of 'judicial activism.' Is judicial activism that behavior which twists and contorts the meaning of the US Constitution or is judicial activism that behavior that insists, in defiance to the ones who are doing the twisting and contorting, that the twisted and contorted rulings that are themselves issued in defiance of the perspicuous meaning of the US Constitution will not be adhered to or obeyed? Only in a legal inside out, and upside down world is it considered judicial activism when Judge Parker prefers the clear meaning of the Constitution to the aberrant interpretations that are consistently being issued from the liberal lickspittle that comprise the majority of the Supremes.
Judge Parker's bold behavior and clarion call that the governing text should be paid attention to over those who control the interpretation of the governing text parallels well a similar behavior when a little less than five centuries ago another man trained in the legal arts likewise pointed to a text and also insisted that the clear meaning of the governing text is to be preferred over the interpretive accretions that had accumulated over time. You might say that Judge Parker is advocating a kind of 'Solo Constitutiono.'
The only issue I would take with the article that explained Judge Parker's actions was a quote that offered of Justice Parker,
"At every turn, he says, he wants the public to understand that 'the big social issues are being decided by the Supreme Court rather than Congress' and that the Court is deciding them unmoored from the words of the Constitution as well as religious values.'"
The part that I am going to take strong exception to is the part outside of the quotation marks thus possibly indicating that the fault is with the reporters summarization of the Justices words and not with Judge Parker's statement. We must understand that the problem isn't that the Courts are deciding social issues unmoored from religious values. The problem rather is that the Courts are deciding social issue moored to a religion that has different values than the ones that informed the Constitution. Religion is at the heart of this debate and it would be most unfortunate if anybody were allowed to believe that what the Supreme Court is doing is unattached to the values of some religion.
Could it be that this is the small beginning of what will be a greater Reformation? Stranger things have happened.
God bless Alabama. God bless Judge Tom Parker.
Constitution Party of Michigan - www.ConstitutionPartyMI.net