STANLEY SCOOP 11-25-03

November 25, 2003

Rick Stanley 
Constitutional Activist
Phone: 303-329-0481
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Stanley Scoop 11/25/03 ** Special Edition **
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SPECIAL EDITION:

Subject: High Court Often Makes an Alp out of a Molehill

High Court Often Makes an Alp out of a Molehill 
by Thomas Sowell - Rocky Mountain News

The Constitution of the United States is not some esoteric document,
written to 
be understood only be people with high IQs and postgraduate education.
It is 
written in rather plain language.

There is even a sort of instructions guide on what the Constitution
means in The 
Federalist Papers - a collection of popular 18th century essays by those
who 
helped write the Constitution, explaining why they did what they did. 

Despite all this, appellate court decisions interpreting constitutional
law 
today are often a huge maze of tangled reasoning, obscure concepts and
complex 
confusion. The motto over the entrance to the Supreme Court of the
United States 
says, "Equal Justice Under Law" but sometimes you might wish that it
said: 
"Brevity is the soul of wit." It is not that the cases are so
complicated in 
themselves but that high-IQ judges have turned simple realities into
complex 
metaphysics. A few years ago, the Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 that
carrying a gun 
near a school was not interstate commerce. To most people, the decision
was 
obvious. So why 5 to 4? You might think the decision should have been 9
to 0 and 
it should not have taken more than one page to explain. Yet the justices
tied 
themselves into knots with lengthy explanations of their votes for and
against.

The reason this decision was so complex and caused such consternation
among some 
legal scholars was that previous generations of Supreme Court justices
had 
turned the Constitution's simple concept of interstate commerce into a 
complicated rationalization of Congress' ever expanding exercises of
power that 
it was never given when the Constitution was written.

Although the 10th Amendment says pretty plainly that the federal
government can 
do only what it is specifically authorized to do, while the people can
do 
whatever they are not specifically forbidden to do, this was not good
enough for 
those who had visions of a more active government in Washington.

The terribly clever people who were put on the courts kept
"interpreting" 
Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce so broadly that anything
they 
wanted to regulate was called "interstate commerce." Thus the interstate 
commerce clause was used to virtually repeal the 10th Amendment. 

Judges got so clever back in the 1940s that even a man who grew food for
himself 
in his own backyard was said to be engaged in interstate commerce - and 
therefore subject to the power of Congress.

After generations of this kind of runaway "interpretation" of the
Constitution, 
it was a shock to some legal scholars when the Supreme Court decided - 5
to 4 -
that Congress could not pass a federal law forbidding people from
carrying guns 
near local schools.

Most states had such laws anyway, and all states had the authority to
pass such 
laws if they wanted to, so this decision did not leave schoolchildren 
unprotected. It just put a stop to one of the thousands of extensions of
federal 
power beyond what the Constitution authorized. 

These overextensions of federal power were not due simply to the
ideological 
biases of judges, though that was undoubtedly a big factor. It also grew
out of 
judges with more brainpower than was necessary to deal with 90 percent
of the 
cases that came before them.

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-- 
""Sic Semper Tyrannis" - Thus Always with Tyrants - John Wilkes Booth"

"Per ardua nec flectitur nec mutat. Confido, 
est voluntas dei, invictus maneo. Addere leci justitiam 
deo certavi et vici." - Rev. Shawn Cole, Cole Firearms Inc.