One of the reasons I had many doubts about our war with the Iraqi government was my concern over what happened after we won. It reminds me of the old saw about the dog that wouldn’t quit chasing cars…until he caught one. Now what do we do? Well, of course, the answer the administration or the majority of Americans will give you sounds simple enough. Install a democratic government and make sure they keep it. Sounds good. Two things must be considered first:
1.) Setting up and installing any kind of democratic, secular government is next to impossible. The main reason I say this is because “democratic secularism” is an oxymoron of the first order. No government based on the whims of believers in religion A is going to be fair to people in religion B.
2.) How can we make sure the people of Iraq keep a republican form of government if we cannot or will not keep our own?
I wish we had spent the money we have spent in Iraq on rescuing our own form of government before we set about trying to impose one on another country.
For those interested in finding out in detail how we have lost ours, I recommend a relatively new book released by Yale University Press, “Democracy by Decree”, by two law professors, Ross Sandler and David Schoenbrod. In this book the authors show in great detail how the trial lawyers and judges have literally changed our form of government from a representative republic to “rule by decree” which is defined in the dictionary as “An authoritative order having the force of law”. We have allowed our judiciary to usurp the power of legislating law; a power specifically granted only to Congress as part of our separation of power between the Executive, Legislative and Judicial branches of our government.
According to the authors of the book, the turning point in allowing rule by coercive court decree began with the government school desegregation case, Brown vs. Board of Education. Prior to this case the authors assert that reform relied on “persuasion, a balancing of contending interests and appeals to public opinion”. The Brown case led to a new era of reform forced on the public and the other two branches of government by class action lawsuits and judicial decree.
The result, according to Messrs. Sandler and Schoenbrod, is that law in the United States is no longer accountable to the people because all levels of our government have kowtowed at the feet of our imperial judiciary, which, in turn, has silenced the voice of the people through ipse dixit whim. (And for you folks that went to government schools, ipse dixit is not the name of that three-girl singing group.)
Because of this, nearly the whole range of Federal, State and Local governments have lost all of their legislative and administrative powers. Schools, welfare agencies, prisons and most other institutions are actually controlled by attorneys and judges, not by governors, mayors or representatives and concomitantly not by the voters.
Because of Brown, the New Deal and subsequent Constitutional and political maneuvering a new paradigm came about; one in which persuasion, political discourse and legislative attempts to reform or resolve issues gave way to judicial coercion.
That, of course led to the growth of special interest organizations and legal entities that went after their agenda through black robe dictates. Again, according to Messrs. Sandler and Schoenbrod, the “reform” revolution is so complete today that “lawyers today are enculturated with the belief that compassion and justice are achieved only through judicial coercion”.
This “reform” has given public power to private lawyers and judges, who now are able to impact the lives of the citizens more forcibly than the people’s elected representatives.
One need look no further than our own State of Arkansas to find horrendous examples of judicial foul play. On two occasions, the people of Arkansas petitioned their government to rid them of the unending slavery that the present feudal system (property taxes) imposes on them. On both occasions the imperialists that sit on the State Supreme Court disenfranchised the citizens of this state by throwing out the people’s voice on the basis of judicial whim.
The state legislature has exhausted one session and is headed, by my count, to at least two more “special” sessions because they can’t solve one major problem. They have no use for the “persuasion, a balancing of contending interests and/or appeals to public opinion” the authors refer to. They cannot speak for themselves. They cannot speak for us. They cannot pass any legislation, reform, re-organization or any other democratic solution. Their hands are tied. They are meaningless. They are puppets. They might as well set a paper cutout of themselves in the chamber seats and go home.
Sounds a little over the top? It’s not. These people are spending their entire time in Little Rock trying to do one thing: They are trying find ways to cave in to the judicial coercion forced on them by a group of judges who decided among themselves that our state education system is not up to their (the judges) liking. There is no way around it….every member of the Arkansas legislature is busily kowtowing to the black-robed kings.
I suggest that before we set about telling the Islamic countries in that part of the world what kind of government they need, we should take a look at our own.
We might find that there is little difference between our government and their government.
Our ayatollahs wear robes too.