I wish I could say that I didn’t see this nightmare coming: the Supreme Court deciding the candidates who will be on the ballot for a “free and fair” election in America.
However, the extra-Constitutional workings of the courts has been a passionate learning point for me, having spoken and written about how the courts have given themselves the powers of Judicial Review and Judicial Activism ad nauseam since I was about 17 years old. One of my favorite stories of swinging and illusory jurisprudence by the courts took place back during the Great Depression, when Roosevelt threatened to stuff the courts with up to 15 Justices when the revered nine stated his New Deals were unconstitutional over and over again. In the middle of the night, after the threat of court stuffing, the High Court suddenly changed their minds for a pending case and a series of New Deals, such as the creation of Social Security, were passed and put into place, despite it being unconstitutional the very day before.
Humorist Cal Tinney quipped it was, “The Switch In Time That Saved Nine”, as the court packing threats died down with the passage of the New Deals legislation.
87 years later, we will have the unquestionable nine Justices deciding who will be allowed on the 2024 ballot. Unfortunately, we have come to the day that was dreaded by several Founding Fathers: the day where America’s Constitution stops working due to the judgments of a singular despotic judicial tribunal that is answerable to no one, as Thomas Jefferson once described the Supreme Court.
No matter what side you are on — whether the court is illegitimate and not kicking an “insurrectionist” (the new definition, of course, in which you do not have to have arms or even be on site) off the ballot or the courts redefine “insurrection” using the unlawful power of Judicial Activism to redefine words that already have meaning — the Supreme Court will be acting illegitimately for the 2024 election, and polling shows that Americans instinctively know this, with a low trust of the courts involving election issues. As an outlier who is highly educated in court history, I agree with both sides that the courts are illegitimate, but they shouldn’t be trusted due to using Powers they were never enumerated in the Constitution, not because of their political leanings, which only have an effect because of the unlawful use of Unconstitutional powers. Powers, in fact, that they have granted to themselves in their court rulings, far outside of the formal amendment process. These additional and highly questionable court Powers are the sole reason the 2024 election can be decided by only 9 people.
Unfortunately, that’s not the only landmark decision they will be making with this singular court opinion. They will also be able to decide the validity of the legal doctrine of self-executing crime, as I opined in a column published in late 2023.
They will also get to decide whether to keep the original definitions of insurrection and incitement (see: a crime), allow the new ones the Colorado Supreme Court made, or make up entirely new ones of their own. They’ll get to decide on whether peaceful terminology is actually secret code, as that was the evidence presented to the courts in Colorado to determine Trump’s incitement of a supposed insurrection in which not a singular person convicted out of 1,200 has been charged with the crime of insurrection. The Justice Department also states there was scant evidence of an insurrection so they couldn’t prosecute anyone with such charges.
While the Colorado Supreme Court states these secret messages were incitement, incitement law actually requires that the average person would interpret words as incitement, not a secret code translated by a few. Since nobody has actually been charged with insurrection, and the Justice Department won’t call it an insurrection — and even some media have shied away from calling it an insurrection — a Jan. 6 rioter is currently hopeful for a default judgement against CNN for defaming him by exaggerating his actions and accusing him of crimes he was never charged with or convicted of committing. It will be interesting to see the outcome, since all evidence points to a lack of insurrection, as a legal standard, even if Activist Judges change law and history to make it so.
However, as the terms, “incite”, “engage”, and “insurrection” are redefined through the Colorado Court’s Judicial Activism, I can’t help but wonder, once again, about how easy it is to change the definitions of words in ratified legislation that already exist and already had original meaning in the legislation to exist in the first place and how illusory and out of reach in makes following the law if judges can change the meaning of words on a whim. A fellow columnist wrote an excellent article series on the Rule of Law vs. The Rule of Lawyers that accurately summarizes how we have reached such a point of legal mischief and judicial chaos due to the politicization of the courts, which is a nice way of saying the courts have been weaponized against political opponents of unlawful government that works outside of the Constitution.
Throughout the years of redefining (for more information, research Black’s Law Dictionary…all editions), we have gotten to the point where words are meaningless due to changing on judicial whim. They can mean whatever we want them to mean, as long as a Judge who wants a specific outcome resides on the bench.
Therefore, we are no longer a country of laws, but a country of Judicial Acitivism, where we now live in a reality that only nine people will be voting in the 2024 election because Colorado Supreme Court Judges decided to make up a bunch of law and new due process procedures because of this “historic event.” The rest of America will only get to vote for whomever the Supreme Court says can be on the ballot.
So how did we get to the point where only nine people will actually be voting in the 2024 election, while we get to choose between their Manchurian Candidates?
Rachel Suh lives in Pagosa Springs, and is a Certified SCRUM Master and Strategic Consultant working in facilitation, mentoring, training, and coaching. She has a passionate hobby of Political Activism.