Another day, another federal judge or judges make a mess of federalism and the original Constitution. Should we expect any less in 2019?
I have long said the Constitution has been dead since 1789, but even if we could argue that it survived into the twentieth century, the modern federal court system has ensured it’s a worthless scrap of parchment. And forget about original interpretation. Even those that profess “originalism” don’t pass muster.
But federal judges and their idiotic rulings make for good podcast fodder, as do the mentally incompetent lefties on Twitter. Perhaps they should join hands and start a love train. “Come on people now, smile on your brother, every judge and Twitter fool get together, and say some stupid things on social media right now.”
Let’s start with SCOTUS, the nine overlords who constantly get things wrong. Just last month, RBG–seemingly back from the dead–issued the majority opinion in the case of Timbs v. Indiana. This 9-0 decision had everyone jumping up and down in euphoria, including libertarians and conservatives. That should give you pause. If everyone says something is great, something is wrong.
The case centered on excessive fines, a real problem throughout the history of Western Civilization. Mr. Timbs was busted for selling heroin, and the Indiana police seized his $42,000 SUV. A jury correctly concluded that was an excessive fine (four times the legal limit for such a case), particularly since Mr. Timbs acquired the vehicle with some life insurance money and not his drug cash. The judge concurred, but in a brilliantly stupid move declared that the actions by the Indiana police and state AG violated the Eighth Amendment, not Section 16 of the Indiana Constitution which, low and behold, prohibits the very thing these brown shirts did.
The State then appealed the decision, and while an Indiana appellate court upheld the lower ruling, the knuckleheads on the Indiana Supreme Court sided with the State, thus forcing an appeal to federal court based on an incorporationist reading of the Fourteenth Amendment. If the first judge had used the Indiana Constitution, not the Eighth Amendment, to defend his decision, the ruling may never had made it past the Indiana Supreme Court, but it did. Shockingly, the SCOTUS used an incorporated Eighth Amendment to strike down the Indiana law. Only Justice Thomas offered a contrary opinion. In his concurrent decision, he railed against substantive due process, the very method the majority of the Court believed gave them the authority to rule on the matter, but still argued that the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Eighth. Thanks, “originalist.”
While the decision was morally and historically correct–so was the first decision by the jury of Timbs’s peers–it further destroyed real federalism and the Tenth Amendment. This was not a federal issue, nor should it have been decided in federal court. The Indiana Constitution explicitly denies the State the authority to inflict excessive fines or cruel and unusual punishment. As it was a State law and not a federal law at the center of the Timbs case, only the State courts should have been involved. We need think locally, act locally judges who understand incorporation is neither a constitutionally sound nor a legally valid position. I discuss this in Episode 211 of The Brion McClanahan Show. Listen here or watch it here.
And then we have a federal judge deciding that women should be subjected to the draft all in the name of equality and fairness. Tom Woods and Kevin Gutzman spelled out how the draft is unconstitutional in Who Killed the Constitution, but I took a different tack. Granted, no one, male or female, should ever be drafted, but the wimps who decided to sue in federal court over this issue needed to be called out for being “men without chests.” This is the decay of Western Civilization. In what mad world do we want women, the vessels of life and humanity, not only subjected to the horrors of war, but sent there in place of capable men? Can anyone imagine a World War II vet saying, “Gee, honey, I know I should go, but you were drafted, so I’ll watch the kids while you go off and fight the Nazis.” Or how about the World War I propaganda featuring a young woman saying, “I wish I were a man, I’d join the Navy. Be a man and do it.” I guess we’d have to change that to “be a person and do it.”
I Tweeted that this was clearly a result of radical feminism as these beta males would not exist without being hammered by the book of equality for most of their lives. The lefties did not like that, even though I was criticizing the very people they despise, what they call “MRAs” or Men’s Rights Advocates. They can’t get analogy, subtlety, context, or nuance, and cause and effect is completely lost on them unless it’s evil racists and billionaires creating oppression. And of course you cannot parody these accounts. It would simply be their reality. I take down the non-chivalrous male in Episode 212 of The Brion McClanahan Show. Listen to it here or watch it here.
Finally, I want to mention the five part online seminar I conducted over the past month for the Abbeville Institute on Albert Taylor Bledsoe’s Is Davis A Traitor? It was a great time on a worthwhile book. Check out each part: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V. You wont leave thinking secession was treason, I guarantee it.
As always, if you want more online learning, enroll in my McClanahan Academy. It’s free and those that enroll get the best deals on forthcoming courses. Use the coupon code PODCAST and get 10% off the five courses I already offer. Even at full price, they are a steal.
You can also support The Brion McClanahan Show by throwing a few pennies my way. Every red cent is greatly appreciated.
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