Your Opinion, Votes & Voice Doesn’t Count
Increasingly, we’re being told by the mandarins running this county that our opinions and votes don’t matter.
Case in point are two recent court cases. Yesterday, a judge in California vetoed the will of 7 million Californians in deciding that a state constitutional amendment limiting marriage to men and women. The other case involved an Arizona judge putting that state’s anti-illiegal immigration law on hold.
On top of that, you have the White House Press Secretary basically telling the 70 percent or more of Missouri voters who reject ObamaCare to shut the hell up.
From the Heritage Institute:
This Tuesday voters in Missouri, by a 40-point margin, approved a ballot measure rejecting the individual mandate at the core of President Barack Obama’s health care law. Asked what the vote meant to the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs said: “Nothing.” Yesterday in San Francisco, federal judge Vaughn Walker gave the exact same weight to a California ballot measure that affirmed marriage as an institution between one man and one woman. Specifically Judge Walker overturned the California Marriage Protection Act after concluding, as a matter of fact, that the majority of Californians who voted to protect marriage were bigots who had no rational basis to define marriage on their own terms. Here are just some of the “facts” Judge Walker found:
•Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.
•The campaign to pass Proposition 8 relied on stereotypes to show that same-sex relationships are inferior to opposite-sex relationships.
•The Proposition 8 campaign relied on fears that children exposed to the concept of same-sex marriage may become gay or lesbian.
•The genetic relationship between a parent and a child is not related to a child’s adjustment outcomes.
•Children do not need to be raised by a male parent and a female parent to be well-adjusted.
How did Judge Walker arrive at these “facts”? By agreeing with everything the same-sex marriage proponents’ “experts” said while ruling that the traditional marriage witness was “unreliable” and “provided no credible evidence to support any of the claimed adverse effects proponents promised to demonstrate.” In so doing, Walker not only ignored the views of millions of Californians, but by basing his decision on the 14th Amendment, he also ignored the factual determinations of every single popular vote that has been held on the issue in the past two decades. According to Judge Walker’s reasoning every single one of these Americans is a bigot whose opinion on marriage has no place under Judge Walker’s Constitution.
More often than not, the decisions to cancel the will of the electorate is not based on the Constitution, law, reason, tradition or science, but merely the opinions, largely ill-formed, of judges and lawyers.
Why bother with elections at all? Why bother with Congress and state legislatures when a small group of appointed members of the judiciary or some bureaucracy can arbitrarily oppose the will of the majority for no other reason than their own personal opinion on any given topic?
The proper corrective to all of this begins at the ballot box, starting this November, but continuing in two years. The next step is to aggressively defund the left, labor unions, bureaucrats, community groups and all the other big-government moochers.
Finally, a clean sweep of the federal judiciary is in order. We need to remove judges like the two in California and Arizona. Congress needs to enact legislation stripping the court’s authority over matters best left to the states. (And yes, Congress has the constitutional authority to limit the court’s perview.)