Leave the cage alone!
The US Constitution brilliantly created a style of government that resembles, if nothing else in modern culture - the inimitable wrestling cage match. The recent kerfuffle over the Supreme Court has pundits coming out of the woodwork with suggestions ranging from a constitutional convention of states (there's a scary idea) to packing the court, a practice that could go on until there are 40 or 50 judges on the court and nothing would ever get done. The biggest complaint from my side of the political aisle is that allowing the packing of the court would make the court an arm of whatever party that packed the court more effectively.
This would be a very bad idea I believe. The Supreme Court is not, nor should not be an arm of the administration or of the congress. It serves as the arbiter between those two branches and the Constitution. While there is this idealism around how law and judicial justice should be free of contamination by religious tenets and beliefs, that's just not possible, especially since people who consider themselves non-religious bring their own ideology/religion to bear in how they view laws and justice. Marxism, socialism, atheism and other anti-Christian ideologies are as much religion as Christianity, Islam or Buddhism.
The Western legal tradition draws most of its view of what is
legal and what should not be from the stone tablets Moses dragged down
from Mt. Sinai (and promptly broke). It says something that despite
Israel's apostasy and Moses' temper tantrum, God made him climb back up
the mountain and this time to carve a copy of the commandments out of
rock. Western law is built on the code inscribed on those tablets.
There is a place in Revelation full of symbolism which
seems to say that His people would, near the end of time, flee to a
wilderness place of safety from rising persecution. I think He was
talking about the United States, which in its time became a refuge from religious persecution for all sorts of Protestants fleeing Catholic persecution and more than a few Catholics who were on the receiving end of persecution by both church and state.
One of the symbols for this refuge to which the "woman" (God's church invisible) flees is symbolized by another beast that was like a lamb but spoke like a dragon. Having confronted a
bull buffalo once, I suspect that was what John saw. Don't
mess with those guys. The buffalo would be an excellent symbol for a place of refuge. The American bison is pretty peaceful mostly, but threaten the
herd or more foolishly, their calves, and they'll flip your car upside
down and tramp on it. Later the lamblike beast
The point is that the Constitution was
brilliantly designed to limit governmental power. It basically created a
cage match arena that pits 3 coequal powers against each other if they
disagree yet gives them the ability to cooperate when it makes
overwhelming sense to do so. The Constitution surrounds the arena,
limiting the fight to the inside of the arena and regulating what comes
out of the arena to the rest of us.
As a conservative, I prefer
to keep the power of the arena limited. Fight it out all y'all wish, but
only let out of the arena what everybody is, if not happy with, at
least able to accept with some grace. I admit I prefer my judicial
system to lean to the right (Ecclesiastes 10:2), but that there should
be some debate, I find healthy. The Supreme Court has made some bad
decisions in the past, Dred Scott, Buck v. Bell, Plessy v Ferguson, Roe
v. Wade (I know some will disagree violently with me on that last one,
but I rather think that a decision that led to the death of more than 52
million unborn infants is one of the more horrible ones since Herod,
Pharoah, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and others who took on themselves power to
murder millions by government decree.
For closing in on 2 1/2
centuries, the system has worked to stem the tide of evil caused by
greed, self-centeredness, lust for power and the odd burst of mass
insanity. It's no surprise then that people with an agenda, facing a
system that blocks them at most every turn would want to alter the
Constitution or simply ignore it and do what they want. So far the
venerable document has managed to hold on, balancing power to kind of
hold at bay the principal articulate by Frank Herbert. "It's not that
power corrupts, but that power attracts the corruptible."
So long as we
can make the urge to tyrannical power too difficult to accomplish within
the arena, we'll be okay. But beware of those who would tear down the
cage that holds them in. They are not your friends. They are enemies of America as it is.
© 2023 by Tom King
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