The main job of courts is to make excuses for all of the various tyrannical power-grabs of the politicians — the same politicians who appoint the judges that sit on those courts. A particularly glaring example of this, which I like to reference, occurred many decades ago when the Supreme Court gave their bogus ruling in the case of Wickard v. Filburn, (317 U.S. 111 (1942)). Their goal was to concoct some legal justification, no matter how contorted and stretched it had to be, to uphold an absolutely unconstitutional act passed by Congress. If you think it is presumptuous of me to claim to know their motives, read on.
In case they didn't teach you this in school, the U.S. Constitution gives the federal government jurisdiction over interstate commerce — meaning trade which crosses state lines — but Congress does not have jurisdiction over things happening within a single state. Over a century and a half ago, the Supreme Court (in the License Tax Cases, 72 U.S. 462 (1866)) explained that, "No interference by Congress with the business of citizens transacted within a state is warranted by the Constitution," except the very few, limited things that the constitution specifically authorizes. Of course, politicians always want to stick their noses into everyone's business and control everything, so they have forever been trying to sneak around the constitutional limitations on their power, and the courts have been helping them to do it. For example...
Once upon a time there was a farmer in the United States who was growing wheat on his own property and consuming it on his own property. This wheat wasn't crossing state lines and wasn't being sold at all, or bartered, or given away, or anything of the sort.
Now, given those undisputed facts, you might (if you're not a politically-appointed crook) assume that Congress couldn't possibly claim that the "interstate commerce" clause of the constitution would give them the right to interfere with some dude growing and consuming his own wheat, on his own property.
But if you therefore assume that that farmer would be free from the meddling control-freakism of political parasites, then you underestimate the "creativity" of the federal courts. (And by "creativity" I mean, "ability to concoct outlandish bullshit.")
If the case had been decided by judges who actually cared about the Constitution, the law, logic, reason, and things like that, their entire thought process and ruling would have gone like this: "Is this farmer engaged in interstate commerce? No, he is not. So can Congress constitutionally regulate this activity? No, they cannot. This law is unconstitutional, and therefore null and void." But that is not what happened. Instead, the court's "reasoning" (which I have to put inside quotation marks, for reasons which will soon become apparent) went like this:
The farmer growing and consuming his own wheat, on his property, could be regulated by Congress under the interstate commerce clause — even though it wasn't interstate and wasn't commerce — because (brace yourself) if the farmer hadn't grown his own wheat, then he might have purchased wheat from someone else, and that other (hypothetical) wheat might have crossed state lines. Therefore, by growing his own wheat on his own property, instead of possibly buying someone else's wheat via interstate commerce, the farmer's activities could theoretically have a "substantial effect" upon interstate commerce (by making less of it happen). And hey, if congress can regulate interstate commerce, then they can also regulate anything that might have a "substantial effect" on interstate commerce, even if it actually was the exact and precise opposite of interstate commerce.
Yes, they really did rule that. Yes, that really was their reasoning. If you doubt me, look it up. Or, for those who don't have time or desire, or just wouldn't know where to look, here is an excerpt from their official ruling, expressing in more flowery terms the same lunacy I just expressed above in plain English:
"[E]ven if [the farmer's] activity be local, and though it may not be regarded as commerce, it may still, whatever its nature, be reached by Congress if it exerts a substantial economic effect on interstate commerce ... [I]f we assume that [homegrown wheat] is never marketed, it supplies a need of the man who grew it which otherwise be reflected by purchases in the open market."
Now, the rulings from the robed excuse-makers aren't always as brazenly ridiculous as that in the Wickard case, but such "outcome-based reasoning," where judges start with a foregone conclusion and the do whatever mental gymnastics they need to do to concoct some rationale for it, isn't all that unusual. In fact, the Wickard ruling was only one in the long line of rulings that have been gradually hacking away at any restrictions on Congress's power to regulate, control and tax whatever they want. They had already just made up the absurd notion that the power to regulate interstate commerce includes the power to regulate things which are not interstate commerce, but which some judge decided have a "substantial effect" upon interstate commerce. But by the time the courts get around to claiming that someone could fall under federal jurisdiction as the result of not doing something — e.g., not buying wheat in interstate commerce — then it becomes silly to even pretend that there are any limits on federal power.
Incidentally, this is exactly and precisely what the Tenth Amendment was intended to prevent. That amendment says that "The powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." In other words, the federal government isn't supposed to do anything that the constitution doesn't specifically say it's allowed to do. However, the vast majority of what the U.S. government now does (and has done since FDR was President) is not authorized in any way, shape or form by the U.S. Constitution. But the federal courts, including the Supreme Court, have just hallucinated into existence legal "authorization" for such things.
— Larken Rose, Parasites on Parade, 2019
#LarkenRose #quote #noLaw #law #USA
