The Supreme Court Tells Voters to Get Lost

I’ve held my fire on the Prop 8 ruling yesterday.  After all, the Supreme Court did not rule directly on Prop 8, and Justice Scalia, whom I highly respect, concurred with the decision.  I respect him so much that I still wonder if I am missing something.

But let me try to get the ruling straight anyway.  Voters approve Prop 8 through a referendum process designed to enable the people to exhert some power when politicians refuse to listen.  The politicians predictably refuse to defend the new law when it is challenged in court.  So supporters step in and defend it.  (Who else will?)  A federal judge who cannot keep his gay activism in his pants rules against Prop 8.  The 9^th Circuit Court of Appeals whose method of jurisprudence is “If it’s Leftist, we like it” rules against Prop 8.  And then at the Supreme Court, a majority of justices says the voters did not have standing to defend their law once the gay federal judge ruled from on high?  Voters whose votes are being nullified by politicians and judge-politicians have no standing to say their votes cannot be nullified? 

Can you say kangaroo court?

This is yet another successful attack on Constitutional democracy from the Feds and their courts.  I am beginning to understand why certain friends who stay informed chose not to vote.

Bill Jurkovich, a voter in Citrus Heights, Calif., says: “Apparently, we the people do not have the right to create a law that the political elite disagree with. Is it any wonder that people are becoming radicalized, have lost faith with the political process, distrust government, and do not vote?”

And if you think just us knuckle dragging right-wingers are concerned with this attack on democracy, think again.

Justice Kennedy, in his dissent from the majority, warned that “the Court’s decision also has implications for the 26 other states that have an initiative or popular referendum system, and which, like California, may choose to have initiative proponents stand in for the State when public officials decline to defend an initiative in litigation.” Kevin Drum, a blogger for the liberal Mother Jones magazine, notes that he is in favor of gay marriage, but that the Supreme Court’s “gutting” of the people’s right to defend their own initiatives “has neither the flavor of justice nor of democratic governance.”

I am hesitant to say much more with the NSA watching and all.  But it is past time for the ruling class to think long and hard about what can happen to a society when the people sense that their voices and votes do not count.  And with election fraud, a tyrannical President, judges who nullify the results of elections, etc. more and more people are sensing just that.

The alternatives to the Consent of the Governed can be unpleasant.