Other Columns by Doug Patton
Doug Patton Bio

Printer-Friendly Version

The Imperial Nine
By Doug Patton
May 6, 2002

"Power corrupts. Absolute power is kind of neat!"
- John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy

Back when America's public schools actually taught history and civics, some of us learned that ordinary citizens have a voice in establishing federal, state and local laws. We learned that the United States of America has a special system of government whereby we, the people, have the right to elect representatives, who then enact legislation in our name. We even learned that in some parts of the country, the people have the right to vote directly for or against some of the statutes and ordinances under which they must live.

Well, it seems our history teachers got it wrong, because that power is now reserved for a very small, elite group of people.

No, this is not a tale about the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission or the Bilderbergers. This is a tale about The Imperial Nine. Nine justices appointed for life to the United States Supreme Court decide the laws of this land. Several landmark decisions prove the point.

When atheist Madelyn Murray O'Hare demanded an end to school prayer, the decision rendered by The Imperial Nine created a societal dichotomy that has lasted nearly forty years.

A decade later, The Nine created a constitutional "right to privacy" in the infamous Roe vs. Wade decision, a sweeping proclamation which struck down the laws against abortion in all fifty states - even though the original lawsuit was brought only against the State of Texas. For nearly thirty years, that ruling has ripped at the fabric of America like nothing since the Dredd Scott decision of 1857, which established the "right" of white Americans to buy, sell, own and otherwise exploit black Americans.

Surveys show that 75 percent of Americans support the death penalty. No matter. The Imperial Nine decided for a time that the practice was "cruel and unusual." By the middle of the 1970s, The Nine had changed their collective mind and ruled that some executions were constitutional after all.

In the 1990s, Colorado voters passed a measure that denied special minority status to homosexuals. In striking down the ordinance, The Imperial Nine ruled that the people had no such right of self-government.

Senate Democrats demand of judicial nominees a blind allegiance to the libertine idol of "abortion rights," while pro-life lawmakers, mostly Republicans, tinker at the edges of the awful decision that first opened America's door to the extermination of one-third of a generation. In 1996, the congress voted to outlaw the horrible practice of partial-birth abortion. Bill Clinton vetoed the measure, and the senate failed by three votes to muster the two-thirds majority necessary for an override.

For fifteen months now, we have had a president who will sign such a ban the moment it lands on his desk, yet no such bill has even been introduced. Why? Because two years ago, in Carhart vs. Stenberg, The Imperial Nine invalidated a similar law passed by the State of Nebraska. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who once was quoted as saying that advancements in fetal medicine someday would put Roe vs. Wade "on a collision course with itself," nonetheless voted with the most radical of The Nine to strike down the Nebraska statute by the narrowest margin possible, 5-4. It did not matter that the ban on partial-birth abortion was supported by Nebraska voters, passed by their elected legislature and signed by their elected governor. The Imperial Nine had ruled.

Recently, The Nine decreed that the federal government has no authority to interfere with the production and distribution of sexually explicit, computer-generated images of children, even though the material is created specifically to feed the perverse appetites of pedophiles. The Imperial Nine, always on the lookout for an opportunity to create a new right for the criminals among us, invited innovative sociopaths everywhere to conceive, create and disseminate the most vile, sadistic images imaginable. The Nine even created a defense for these vermin: simply dare the feds to prove that the little children being tortured, raped and murdered on those videotapes were not created on some pervert's iMac.

And finally, there is the most convincing proof of all that the authority of The Imperial Nine now goes unchallenged in the legislative and executive branches of our federal government: passage of so-called campaign finance reform. In a disgraceful abdication of their oath of office, the congress passed and the president signed into law a bill that most of them knew to be unconstitutional. Their vow to the American people to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States," was cynically replaced with the flippant, "We'll let the Supreme Court sort that out."

Indeed.