Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker: Courts Must Recognize God’s Law Limits What State Can Do

[TheGeneral]

"Webster's definitions demonstrate that our Founders thought in terms of a plurality of governments -- including individual government and the covenantal governments of the family, the state, and the church -- and not of state government alone. Each of these governments possesses its own exclusive jurisdiction of authority, constituting the original 'separation of powers.' Thus the separation of powers among the spheres of governments is of a higher order and greater significance than the separation of powers within a particular sphere of government, as in the state government's division into executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

Link to full article:
http://www.theamericanview.com/index.php?id=373

[Joe_Liberty]

Michael Peroutka donated $100,000 to Parker's campaign:

http://www.al.com/newsflash/regional/index.ssf?/base/politics-0/1149263362113900.xml&storylist=alabamanews

[Areopagus]

"Webster's definitions demonstrate that our Founders thought in terms of a plurality of governments -- including individual government and the covenantal governments of the family, the state, and the church -- and not of state government alone. Each of these governments possesses its own exclusive jurisdiction of authority, constituting the original 'separation of powers.' Thus the separation of powers among the spheres of governments is of a higher order and greater significance than the separation of powers within a particular sphere of government, as in the state government's division into executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

Link to full article:
http://www.theamericanview.com/index.php?id=373

Walter E. Williams [1] recently wrote “Judicial Activism Or Restraint”[2]


Are federal, state and local justices appointed to office to impose their personal views on society or to interpret law? Is it a judge's duty to uphold the U.S. Constitution, and state constitutions in the cases of state and local judges, or is it their duty to uphold foreign law and United Nations treaties? Should what a judge sees as "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society" and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights govern court decisions, or the U.S. Constitution?

It was the former, not the U.S. Constitution, that determined last year's Roper v. Simmons decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the execution of a convicted murderer because he was 17 years old at the time of his offense. Judges have used their power to impose their own values on our society. They've ordered federal and state agencies to spend billions of dollars to carry out their favorite policies. They've ordered legislatures to raise taxes. In pursuit of their vision of justice, they've forced universities, businesses and government agencies to engage in race and sex discrimination.

Alabama Supreme Court Justice Tom Parker has little patience with his colleagues who use their office to impose their values instead of applying the written law, but he's in trouble for saying so. Judge Parker wrote an opinion article that was published in The Birmingham News on Jan. 1. It criticized the U.S. Supreme Court's 5-4 decision that banned executions for murderers who were under 18 when they committed their crimes. He also criticized his Alabama Supreme Court colleagues who followed the high court's ruling when they set aside the execution of a young Alabama death row inmate, Renaldo Adams, who was 17 at the time when he brutally raped and repeatedly stabbed a pregnant woman, then left her to die in the presence of three children.


ROPER V. SIMMONS, Scalia, J., dissenting:

To add insult to injury, the Court affirms the Missouri Supreme Court without even admonishing that court for its flagrant disregard of our precedent in Stanford. Until today, we have always held that “it is this Court’s prerogative alone to overrule one of its precedents.” State Oil Co. v. Khan, 522 U.S. 3, 20 (1997). That has been true even where “ ‘changes in judicial doctrine’ ha[ve] significantly undermined” our prior holding, United States v. Hatter, 532 U.S. 557, 567 (2001) (quoting Hatter v. United States, 64 F.3d 647, 650 (CA Fed. 1995)), and even where our prior holding “appears to rest on reasons rejected in some other line of decisions,” Rodriguez de Quijas v. Shearson/
American Express, Inc., 490 U.S. 477, 484 (1989). Today, however, the Court silently approves a state-court decision that blatantly rejected controlling precedent. [3]


Professor Paulsen agrees in [4] “The Irrepressible Myth Of Marbury”: [5]

If Marbury is right, the judicial doctrine of stare decisis - the practice of generally adhering to precedent "whether or not mistaken" - is wrong. Stare decisis is, of course, not required by the Constitution, as even the Supreme Court concedes. But even more fundamentally, when used in this strong sense of adhering to precedents even if wrong, stare decisis is unconstitutional. (In any other sense, stare decisis is simply irrelevant, or deceptive: a court that invokes the doctrine to justify a decision it was prepared to reach on other grounds is adding a makeweight, or using the doctrine as a cover for its judgment on the merits.)

[….]

Marbury's logic applies for lower courts as well as others. Thus, a lower court may, and arguably must, "underrule" (to coin a term) Supreme Court precedents that depart from a sound reading of the written Constitution. The Supreme Court usually will have the authority and jurisdiction to review and reverse such lower court underrulings; such jurisdiction is consistent with Article III and the constitutional structure generally. But that does not mean that the lower court judges are personally required to abet the constitutional violation. They can, and should, make the Supreme Court do its own dirty work. They can, and must, exercise their own (reverse-able) constitutional interpretive power independently, and correctly.
[….]

….state government officials, who likewise swear an oath to support the U.S. Constitution as "supreme law of the Land," are not bound to submit docilely to unconstitutional actions of the agencies of the national government. By the logic of Marbury, they cannot be bound by the erroneous constitutional views of organs of the national government, but are empowered, even required, to interpret the Constitution directly.

Williams gets it, Parker gets it, the U.S. Supreme Court gets it, Paulsen gets it, anyone reading the U.S. Constitution gets it, why can folk like Gary Palmer[6] , President of the Alabama Policy Institute[7] get it?

1. http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/vita.html
2. http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/wew/articles/06/judicial.html
3. http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/03-633.ZD1.html

4. http://www.law.umn.edu/facultyprofiles/paulsenm.htm
5. http://www.law.northwestern.edu/mainpages/curriculum/colloquium/Michael%20Paulsen.pdf
6. http://www.theamericanview.com/forums/showpost.php?p=7734&postcount=3
7. http://www.judicial.state.al.us/supreme.cfm?Member=120 Tom Parker was founding Executive Director of the Alabama Family Alliance (now the Alabama Policy Institute) and, later, the founding Executive Director for the Alabama Family Advocates, which were state organizations associated with Dr. James Dobson and Focus on the Family.