Ever since the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision, politicians–including a few RINOs who would like to be president–have taken to calling it the “law of the land” when asked to take a position on the controversial ruling. In light of a new statement issued by a group of legal scholars, perhaps they should reconsider playing this cop-out card in the future.
Breitbart.com is reporting that more than sixty prominent legal scholars have issued a statement saying the Supreme Court’s decision “cannot be taken to have settled the law of the land,” and they are calling on federal and state office holders, along with regular citizens, to act as if the decision is invalid.
According to scholars, the bare-majority decision on homosexual marriage lacks “anything remotely resembling a warrant in the text, logic, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution” and therefore “must be judged anti-constitutional and illegitimate.”
One signer of the controversial proposition is Professor Robert George of Princeton University, who said:
“We stand with James Madison and Abraham Lincoln in recognizing that the Constitution is not whatever a majority of Supreme Court justices say it is. We remind all officeholders in the United States that they are pledged to uphold the Constitution of the United States, not the will of five members of the Supreme Court.”
Specifically, these legal experts are telling officeholders to, “refuse to accept Obergefell as binding precedent for all but the specific plaintiffs in that case, recognize the authority of states to define marriage, and the right of federal and state officeholders to act in accordance with those definitions.”
The references to Madison and Lincoln should not be taken lightly. President Lincoln acted as if the Dred Scott decision–which concluded that neither slaves nor free blacks could be considered American citizens–was illegitimate and he refused to recognize that it effected anyone in the country except the immediate plaintiffs.
Shortly after this controversial ruling, the Liberty Counsel filed a brief arguing that Dred Scott established a precedent in the United States for a state Supreme Court to reject a “U.S. Supreme Court mandate which is unlawful.”
“There is existing precedent for a state’s highest court to reject an unlawful mandate from the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Liberty Counsel’s founder and chairman, Mat Staver. “The hope of our constitutional Republic rests upon state officials and American citizens who will refuse to allow five, black-robed judges to rob us of our free, representative form of government.”
“A judicial opinion without constitutional basis is not law and should not be followed by any state or citizen,” he said.
As we learned from Kentucky County Clerk Kim Davis, the implications of judicial tyranny are far-reaching. But as we see from these legal scholars, perhaps there are more Kim Davises in America’s future.
David Leach is the owner and publisher of The Strident Conservative where he is proudly politically-incorrect and always “right,” and he is also a frequent contributor at RedState.com.
His political commentaries can be heard daily on KLZ560 AM at 3pm MST and on other Crawford Broadcasting stations throughout the day.
