The Rightful Remedy
Atlanta, GA
January 14, 2022
Yesterday we received a decision from nine people as to whether another person can tell hundreds of millions of different individuals what drugs they must take. While many of us had reasons to cheer or jeer the results, not enough found the scenario disturbing.
How did Americans come to blithely accept that the US government is the final arbiter of its own power? Why should the Supreme Court judge a case in which the US government is a participant? In what other situation would one party to a dispute be assigned to determine the outcome?
Under the federal system the Constitution created, each branch of the US government is responsible for interpreting, defending, and upholding that document. And every state is too. If the US government engages in unconstitutional acts, it is the duty of the states to resist…by ignoring or defying the federal usurpations.
As Thomas Jefferson noted, the judicial branch is not the sole interpreter of constitutional legitimacy or law. John Marshall notwithstanding, that would be absurd. The other branches also have that responsibility, which is why their representatives take an oath to fulfill it.
But the states are the greatest bulwark against US government aggression. It was a compact among the states that created the federal union, and their individual conventions that ratified the Constitution.
In this arrangement, the states are the dog; the federal government is the tail (or something in close proximity).
As Jefferson asserted in 1798, unconstitutional federal laws, edicts, or mandates are not binding on the states. And “among powers having no common judge, each party has”, as Jefferson put it in the Kentucky Resolutions, “an equal right to judge for itself, as well of the infractions, as of the mode and measure of redress.”
Whenever the US government assumes powers not delegated, those acts are “unconstitutional, void, and of no force.“ In those situations, “nullification” is, as Jefferson put it, “the rightful remedy.” And so it is today.
As it happened, the Court yesterday blocked the egregious Executive mandate that any company with at least 100 employees require each of them to receive a Covid “vaccine” or a weekly “test”. Yet it could easily have gone the other way. And it did uphold a separate outrage forcing “vaccination” upon workers at facilities receiving Medicare or Medicaid funds.
But why should it come to this? How can such important and personal decisions be left to random whims of a few judicial jackasses in black robes?
During oral arguments preceding these verdicts, several justices revealed not only their constitutional incomprehension, but also the unbridgeable chasm between their conception of Covid and the actual impact of the disease and the vaccines.
One particularly moronic member wondered why a state would be permitted to do something if the federal government couldn’t. This astounding legal lunacy came from a Supreme Court justice…who we’d expect to have at least a passing acquaintance with the Tenth Amendment.
This same ignoramus separately asserted that 100,000 children were currently hospitalized “in serious condition, many on ventilators.” This is a remarkable level of idiocy. It has not only never been true, it has for two years been obviously and incontrovertibly false.
There’ve not been that many children seriously ill with Covid since the virus first escaped the lab or billowed from a bat. The actual number of hospitalized kids is no more than about 3,300…and most of those are incidental.
Meanwhile, two other justices implied that “we know” that the vaccines are the best way to stop transmission, as if these nitwits hadn’t read a newspaper in the last few months. We’ve all seen these sorts of hysterics and scientific illiterates infesting school boards and contaminating “public health” bureaucracies, but now we know they’re also on the Supreme Court.
Yet these are the Solons in whom we are told to repose our fate. But why? They clearly don’t understand even the rudimentary aspects of the situation on which they’re expected to rule, or of the document that’s supposed to guide them.
Besides, we don’t know these people. They don’t live in our neighborhoods or share our worldview. I never asked them to make these decisions for me. We have almost nothing in common. We’ve never even met. Why should we assume that their incentives align with our interests?
We are independent individuals and a free people. We delegated (actually, our ancestors did; I never yielded anything) certain limited and specific powers to a central government for very particular purposes.
We’re not obligated to follow arbitrary orders, unconstitutional edicts, or incoherent judicial pronouncements. We are instead drawn down Thomistic trails, and to ride a Jeffersonian road.
While Jefferson was no Dominican and Aquinas no republican, they both recognized the sovereignty of the individual, and the lure of the local. The Catholic doctrine of subsidiarity is consistent with the Jeffersonian concept of divided authority and deference to the smallest possible unit…ideally the family, or the individual.
The US government is constitutionally confined to specific powers, each of which is carefully enumerated and strictly limited. We have no moral obligation or legal liability to obey acts or orders that breach those boundaries. Any federal laws, executive orders, or judicial edicts that violate them are to be promptly nullified and derisively defied.
That, as Jefferson said, is the “rightful remedy”.
JD
