Imperial Valley Christian Center

Well, unfortunately, I get to say I told you so. In this post, Should The Supreme Court Base Its Decisions On Foreign Laws , I mentioned that absent congressional intervention the courts were going to use foreign laws as a source of authority for deciding American cases. In a decision released today, (Okay, I have to admit it was actually written months ago but I didn't know that.) the Supreme Court did just that. I'm referring to the Supreme Court's decision, in Roper v. Simmons, that it is unconstitutional to execute minors. Here's a real good objective explanation of the decision: Juvenile death sentences nullified.

Now the point isn't that it was wrong for them to end the execution of minors. I  don't have much of a problem with that. The point is the basis for the Supreme Courts decision. The Supreme Court overruled democratically enacted
laws. What was the basis for this decision? Did they discover some language in the Constitution which no one had ever noticed? Were they interpreting some new constitutional amendment? No. They based their decision on there personal judgment as to what is right and wrong and they supported it by referring to the laws of other countries. They overruled democratically achieved result because they didn't like what the majority of Americans voted for. They have, in effect, become the new rulers of America.

Here's Justice Scalia's take on the court's decision from his dissenting opinion:

In urging approval of a constitution that gave life tenured judges the power to nullify laws enacted by the people's representatives, Alexander Hamilton assured the citizens of New York that there was little risk in this, since [t]he judiciary . . . ha[s] neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment. The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961). But Hamilton had in mind a traditional judiciary, bound down by strict rules and precedents which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them. Id., at 471. Bound down, indeed. What a mockery today's opinion makes of Hamilton's expectation, announcing the Court's conclusion that the meaning of our Constitution has changed over the past 15 years not, mind you, that this Court's decision 15 years ago was wrong, but that the Constitution has changed. The Court reaches this implausible result by purporting to advert, not to the original meaning of the Eighth Amendment, but to the evolving standards of decency,… of our national society. It then finds, on the flimsiest of grounds, that a national consensus which could not be perceived in our people's laws barely 15 years ago now solidly exists. Worse still, the Court says in so many words that what our people's laws say about the issue does not, in the last analysis, matter … The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures.