A Constitutional Crisis

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The Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia was an historical achievement of monumental significance. John Adams referred to the completed work as "the greatest single effort of National deliberation that the world has ever seen." The body of men assembled there determined the form and structure for a new federal order of government necessitated by the break of the Colonies from the tyranny of British rule and the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation. From the order established by that document, there developed the greatest, the freest, most prosperous, advanced, and blest Nation on earth. 

America now finds herself faced with a constitutional crisis that threatens her sustainability as constituted. The principal precipitator of this crisis is none other than the United States Supreme Court. Designed to be the guardian of the Constitution so that its design, purposes, and functions be preserved, the Court has largely relinquished this duty. This, in the Court’s view, was necessary if it was to assume a larger role in the reshaping of national order that it conform to secular, progressive ideology. The Framers, however, never intended that the Supreme Court should have such extensive involvement and power in controlling and directing ever-widening areas of national life, particularly those internal matters left exclusively to the States. Alexander Hamilton stated that the Court was "the weakest of the three departments of power." He added that the Court "can take no active resolution whatever," as it has "neither Force nor Will, but merely judgment ...." A reading of Article III makes clear the limited duties and powers bestowed upon the Supreme Court. 

How the Supreme Court has, without constitutional warrant, taken for itself such expansive powers to draw ever more issues of national life into its sphere of administration, is by way of the Fourteenth Amendment. By means of that Amendment, the Court invented the "incorporation theory" by which it applied the first eight Amendments of the Bill of Rights to the States. Not only has that act by the Court annulled the given purpose and function of the Bill of Rights, but it permits the Court at will to usurp a wide range of internal matters and powers reserved exclusively to the States by the Tenth Amendment. 

By virtue of the foregoing illegal actions by the highest tribunal in the Nation, the governmental, political, legal, moral, and spiritual order as originally established has been profoundly and detrimentally transformed. It was Thomas Jefferson who foresaw that the federal judiciary would play a major role in this labor of national reconstitution. Unless there be a reining in of this destructive federal instrument, the direction of national life will eventually be centered in Washington. We are well along this path. 

The author gives examination to the manner in which the Supreme Court has accumulated such undelegated powers, to some of the major cultural outcomes resulting from the wrongful exercise of those powers, to how the Court can be returned to the limited powers assigned by Article III, and to some steps which must be taken to restore constitutional order.