Rule of Law

The rule of law is incredibly important. It is the very foundation upon which our nation was built. When the United States was founded it was in reaction to the rule of man. The king was not listening to the colonies and was oppressing them so when they were deciding upon the structure of the nation they wanted to permanently avoid the abuses they had experienced. The only way to ensure that was to not have a person as the highest authority. Thus the constitution was born. The constitution is the highest authority in the land. It cannot be overruled. It can be changed, and has been 27 times, but it is still the final authority.

Every law we have flows from the authority of the constitution. Including the concept that the law is the ruling factor not man. We do have judges to interpret laws, but their authority is very limited even if they do not like the law in question they still have to follow it. Since not everyone likes all the laws we have we have methods and processes for adding or changing or removing laws in order to adapt our legal system as necessary.

Unfortunately there seems to be a growing trend towards people wanting to ignore the law. Not in a "breaking the law" kind of way, but more ignoring it. Here is an article about President Obama systematically ignoring laws that he doesn't like. It is a bit old, but it illustrates the point. More recently we have the example of Hillary Clinton ignoring the rules and laws dictating the handling of secure information as well as general government business communication, and the FBI choosing to ignore her infractions.

There is a wider issue of government leaders, particularly on the left, taking an "ends justifies the means" strategy when it comes to advancing their agendas. Even if I agreed with their end goals I would still be upset. They are undermining the foundation of our democracy. Our government was built with systems in place to change things. USE THEM. If you can't get the changes you want then argue your case. Be more persuasive. And maybe, just maybe you will still fail because most people don't agree. It's called democracy.

One last example, and probably the worst I have seen. The supreme court in Obergefell v Hodges ruled that state level bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional. They declared that there was a constitutional right for same sex marriage. Now, regardless of my opinion of whether or not that was a good ruling in the sense that same sex marriage should be allowed it was totally reprehensible on the basis that the constitution does not discuss marriage let alone homosexuality. So the idea that they could strike down state constitutional amendments on such weak grounds is mind boggling. I will close with this excerpt from Justice Scalia's dissent on the ruling.

“[I]t is not of special importance to me what the law says about marriage. It is of overwhelming importance, however, who it is that rules me. Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact—and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create ‘liberties’ that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”