Grim's Hall

Like Hell!

This line of thinking among our jurists must die the death. When a member of the US Supreme Court makes statements like these, you know it is time for the citizenry to reclaim power from the court:

The U.S. judiciary should pay more attention to international court decisions to help enrich our nation's standing abroad, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said Tuesday. . . .

Also influential was a court brief filed by American diplomats who discussed the difficulties confronted in their foreign missions because of U.S. death penalty practices, she said.

Let's examine what is wrong with this.

1) The basis of law in the United States is the Constitution. To the degree that so-called "international law" has a place in our system, that place is limited to signed treaties ratified by the Senate. That is the only way that the Constitution permits the "international community" to participate in legislating for the United States.

2) The reason for this is to preserve the requirement that innovations in government's range and power must be approved by the People. Because all government powers are powers lost by the citizen, there can be no rightful extension of government except through Constitutional means. That is the rule. That is the law. All else is lawless.

What the Supreme Court advocates here is allowing nations outside of the United States to legislate for the United States. If any nation dared to impose such a thing by force, we would resist to the last hundred men:

[F]or, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom -- for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.

Yet the Supreme Court would give in to this in the face of no greater force than public opinion. Foreign public opinion. Are we not a nation, who is the greatest of nations?

"This is too much to demand for the delivery of one servant: that your Master should receive in exchange what he must else fight many a war to gain!" So Tolkien wrote. Foreign public opinion is, or could be, a fine servant: but there is far too great a demand here. We must preserve our freedom, and our independence, against jurists even as against armies.