A coalition of Christian leaders, including the Illinois Family Institute’s Dave Smith, has sent a letter to President Donald Trump calling on him to move forward with his plans to revoke President Barack Obama’s policies regarding “transgenders” in the military. An article at The Center for Military Readiness (CMR) explains why the letter is necessary:

In recent weeks, two federal district judges exceeded their authority by ordering the Trump Administration to continue enforcing President Barack Obama’s policies regarding transgenders in the military. They did this even though President Donald J. Trump has initiated formal procedures to review and revoke those policies.

The administration can and should defend presidential prerogatives and sound policies to strengthen our military, but the problem requires immediate attention at the administration’s highest levels.  It would be dangerous to sacrifice the President’s constitutional military powers, and to disregard Supreme Court precedents while allowing judges to make military policy.

The Illinois Family Institute reached out to an attorney specializing in constitutional law to explain why federal district judges think they have the authority to make military policy. The attorney’s response was simple: Those judges are merely giving us another demonstration of lawlessness that we have been witnessing at high levels in our government.

Since it is an obvious overreach by those judges, the Trump Administration should just ignore the rulings. Instead, the administration has appealed the rulings to the D.C. Circuit Court.

In its article titled “‘Supreme Judicial Commanders'” Should Not Run Our Military,” CMR expands further:

President Trump has the right, and the responsibility, to resist these activist court rulings and more that may be handed down in the coming months.

The Commander-in-Chief also has the right, and the responsibility, to restore sound Defense Department policies that were in place long before President Obama took office.

The U.S. Constitution does not grant to any federal judge powers to make policy for the military. (See Article 1, Section 8, and Article II, Section 2.)  The judges’ bizarre rulings favoring transgender plaintiffs were issued without any constitutional authorization, and they are a direct affront to the authority of the Commander-in-Chief.

If the Trump administration fails to act, the result would “shift control of our military to unaccountable, activist judges.” This would, in turn, do the following:

…convey the devastating message that the administration does not have the political will to do what President Trump promised the voters he would do — end political correctness in the military.

The coalition letter explains why President Trump should resist the courts:

At a time when there is widespread concern over the decline of military readiness in the U.S. armed forces, our military has become involved in an extravagant and novel social program involving individuals who will be unable to serve effectively for extended periods of time due to their need for medical and psychological care.

There is no evidence to suggest that the DOD adequately addressed the impact President Obama’s policy experiment would have on military readiness given the costs and physical effects of gender transition. Additionally, no consideration was given to the conscience and religious rights of military personnel who may be required to share close quarters, including showers, with individuals of the opposite sex. Nor were the conscience and religious rights of military personnel addressed for those who may have objections to providing transgender health services, such as hormone therapy, gender reassignment surgery, or counseling.

The letter goes on to say, “The focus of military training should be combat effectiveness, not social engineering…. This will ensure our military focuses on its mission of fighting and winning wars, not experimenting with our troops’ social lives” (emphasis added).

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to President Donald Trump to encourage him to continue to focus on military readiness and the well-being of our military by reversing President Obama’s harmful transgender policy.

You can also call the White House comment line at (202) 456-1111 to leave a voice message for the administration.

Click here to read the coalition letter. Click here to read the article by the Center for Military Readiness. Click here and here for more information about the Constitutional role of the federal courts.

End-of-Year Challenge

As you may know, IFI has a year-end matching challenge to raise $160,000. That’s right, a great group of IFI supporters are colluding with us to provide an $80,000 matching challenge to help support IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.

Please consider helping us reach this goal!  Your donation will help us stand strong in 2018!  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 876
Tinley Park, Illinois 60477

Over the course of the past few months I gathered articles about the question of “judicial supremacy” — are U.S. Supreme Court decisions “the law of the land,” or are they rulings on cases?

Here is that page of excerpts, quotes, and links: Judicial Supremacy: Not in the U.S. Constitution, Not the Intention of the Founding Fathers.

Republicans and conservatives rarely even attempt to disseminate information about the U.S. Constitution to the uninformed and misinformed. Of course, that is a bit much to ask when too many on our side aren’t even clear on what it says.

For many who have attended most law schools in the country, the chances are greater than not that they came away with the idea that, not only is the U.S. Supreme Court the highest court in the land, but it is also the supreme governing body. Why do so many law school graduates think that? Because that is what law schools teach.

What is sad is that so many conservatives fall for the notion of judicial supremacy. As to why they do, I can only engage in a bit of psychological speculation.

Here are just eight possible reasons why conservatives fall for and then defend the theory of judicial supremacy:

1.) Because they weren’t actually taught the U.S. Constitution — but rather the opinions of U.S. Supreme Court justices. Yes, this is an important distinction if you actually want to understand the U.S. Constitution, and not merely the written opinions about the U.S. Constitution by unelected lawyers.

2.) Because even as they were taught to consider legislative debate and the writings of legislators when it comes to interpreting statutes, they completely ignore the words of the Founding Fathers regarding the design and purpose of the U.S. Supreme Court.

3.) Because they absolutely hate the idea that they were taught wrong. After all, if they were misinformed about this, what else might they have been misinformed about?

4.) Because it flies in the face of the idea that lawyers are an elite class — if those nine lawyers are no longer the oligarchy they were led to believe it is, their sense of elitism is threatened.

5.) Because they can’t conceive of how American government can work if it’s all about checks and balances and divided power — someone has to be in charge, right?

6.) Because they can’t grasp that the power is invested in the People, not in whatever majority happens to sit on the Court at any given time.

7.) Because just like the idea that “any kid can grow up to be president” is lovely, so too is the notion that “any lawyer can some day be appointed to be that fifth and deciding vote on U.S. Supreme Court cases and thus the ruler of the land — superior to the lowly elected U.S. President down Pennsylvania Avenue and those nobodies that populate the U.S. Senate and U.S. House across the street.“One ‘us’ needs to be in charge.”

8.) Because “I went to law school and you didn’t, therefore I know better.”

This last one is actually my favorite of them all, since I enjoyed both a year of “Con Law” in undergrad while studying political science and political philosophy, and one year while in law school. The United States Constitution wasn’t written based upon the opinions of legal minds but rather that of political philosophers, political scientists, and statesmen. Why some think lawyers have special knowledge about the U.S. Constitution is a mystery to me.

Within the past few days I added two articles to that page of links. First, one I’d missed from late June. Second, a new article that posted just three days ago. Here are excerpts from both of them:

The Myth of Judicial Supremacy
By Paul Moreno (June 26, 2015)

Forget Marbury v. Madison. Judicial supremacy is mostly an invention of the Warren Court. The Supreme Court this morning declared that states cannot limit marriage to one man and one woman.

But this is not the last word on the question. Article VI of the Constitution reads: “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties . . . shall be the supreme law of the land . . . ” The idea that Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution are the supreme law of the land is a very recent contention.

When the Constitution was written and for a long time thereafter, many doubted that the Court had the authority to interpret the Constitution at all — in other words, they believed that the Court had no power of “judicial review.” Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist 78, made the classic argument that, given a written constitution established by the sovereign people, the Court had no choice but to maintain the supremacy of the people’s Constitution when it was alleged to be in conflict with an ordinary law passed by their representatives.

Today’s legend of judicial supremacy begins with Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Marbury v. Madison (1803). In fact, Marbury was quite a modest decision, in which Marshall held that Congress could not extend the jurisdiction of the Court beyond what the Constitution had provided. (And it is unlikely that the act in question did so anyway.) The decision was hardly ever cited for the next century.

Marshall never made any claim of judicial supremacy, nor did the country accept any such principle. Presidents Jefferson and Jackson resisted the idea that the Court had a monopoly on constitutional interpretation.

Moreno goes on to explain that “The myth of judicial supremacy began near the end of the 19th century, when conservatives sought to justify unpopular Court decisions — especially the 1895 decision holding the income tax unconstitutional.”

And that “Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the Court went on to ever bolder exercises of judicial power”:

The first rhetorical expression of judicial supremacy came in Cooper v. Aaron (1958), when a federal district court, following the High Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), had ordered the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. The justices claimed that Marbury v. Madison had “declared the basic principle that the federal judiciary is supreme in its exposition of the law of the Constitution, and that principle has ever since been respected by this court and the country as a permanent and indispensable feature of our constitutional system.” For the first time, the Court now added that “the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment enunciated by this court in the Brown case is the supreme law of the land.” Civil rights became such a popular cause that the Court has been living off the moral capital of Brown ever since.

Can you imagine how upset lawyers are when they learn about the short term memory problem of their esteemed professors?

I encourage you to read Moreno’s entire article here.

Here an excerpt from our next new link, where the writer touches on the confusion of many that argue against judicial supremacy:

Why Judicial Supremacy Isn’t Compatible with Constitutional Supremacy
By Ramesh Ponnuru (September 10, 2015)

A pro-choice voter in New Hampshire had a question for John Kasich, the Republican governor of Ohio, who was making the rounds as a presidential candidate: Would he “respect” Roe v. Wade even though he is a pro-lifer? Kasich answered, “Obviously, it’s the law of the land now, and we live with the law of the land.”

Whether he knew it or not, Kasich had wandered into a debate over the courts, one in which some of the other presidential candidates are also participants. Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, has denounced “judicial tyranny.” When five justices ruled that the Constitution requires governments to recognize same-sex marriage, he scoffed that the Supreme Court was not “the Supreme Being.”

It’s an often-heated debate. Huckabee’s side says that the courts have established a “judicial supremacy” at odds with the actual constitutional design; the other side says that people like Huckabee are threatening the rule of law. Both sides have some reasonable points, and both could profit from conducting the debate at a lower level of abstraction.

Huckabee’s side of the argument is of course the weaker one in our political culture. Think of how often people say, without realizing they are making a controversial claim, that abortion is “a constitutional right” or that laws against it are “unconstitutional.” The Supreme Court has ruled to that effect; our shorthand treats its rulings as either correct by definition or authoritative in such a strong sense that we should describe them as though they were. “The Constitution is what the judges say it is,” as Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said before he was on the Court. Even when arguments about judicial supremacy appear to have no practical import, they lie beneath judgments about how we should talk about judicial decisions.

The case against this way of thinking holds that judicial supremacy is incompatible with constitutional supremacy. The courts can get the Constitution wrong; if they could not, there would be no point to justices’ trying to get it right by reasoning about the Constitution. Judicial review, though not explicitly authorized by the Constitution, can be inferred from it: In cases where the courts have to decide whether to apply the Constitution or a statute that conflicts with it, the higher law has to take precedence. The case against judicial supremacy rests on a similar inference: In cases where a judicial interpretation of the Constitution is at odds with the actual document, it is the latter that deserves the allegiance of citizens and officeholders. Kasich is therefore wrong: The Constitution is “the law of the land,” not Roe. (You can look it up in the Constitution’s sixth article.)

Read more: National Review

This article was originally posted at JohnBiver.com