Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Bryan Fischer, Executive Director

FIRST AMENDMENT, PART 3

3. The federal judiciary has no constitutional authority to interfere with religious expression

In addition to the "Establishment" clause, the First Amendment also contains what is known as the "Free Exercise" clause: "Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting the free exercise" of religion.

In truth, this prohibition applies to every branch of the federal government, including the judiciary. In the system of central government established by the Founders, it was the responsibility of Congress to make the law, the responsibility of the executive branch to enforce the law, and the responsibility of the judiciary to apply the law in cases of dispute.

In other words, the executive branch has no constitutional authority to enforce any law other than what Congress passes, and the judiciary has no constitutional authority to create or overturn law - it was intended only to serve in a fact-finding capacity, determining whether a law passed by Congress had been transgressed or not.

Its role was intended to be similar to that of an umpire in baseball. Umpires do not make the rules; they understand that role belongs to others. Their job is simply to apply the rules made by others in game situations. It is not the province of umpires to evaluate the rules of baseball, or to discard the ones they find disagreeable; they have a responsibility to enforce the rules fairly whether they happen to think they are good rules or not.

And so the judiciary has no authority to change the rules of the game. Its role is to apply the laws given to it by Congress fairly and justly. Once it begins to impose its own judgment over that of Congress, it has exceeded its constitutional authority, and is in fact itself in violation of the Constitution.

Since Congress is prohibited by the Constitution from interfering in any way with freedom of religious expression, the federal judiciary is also bound in the same way and by the same restraint. This means that the federal judiciary, according to the original intent of our Founding Fathers, has no legal authority to tell state governments, or city officials, or school officials, or students, that certain expressions of religious sentiment are impermissible.

For the federal judiciary to forbid schools to read the Bible or to offer prayers is an unconstitutional and entirely illegal exercise of judicial arrogance and tyranny. Such interference represents a direct violation of the Constitution's prohibition against the central government meddling with religious expression in any way.

Thus, in reality, it is not school officials who are in violation of the Constitution when they offer Bible readings and prayer in the classroom, it is rather the Supreme Court which is in violation, by prohibiting what it has no constitutional warrant even to address. To intrude in such a way is to do expressly what the Constitution forbids the federal government to do. The federal judiciary has overstepped its constitutional limits the moment it even accepts a case about such matters.

Religious expression in states, cities, and schools, under the Constitution, is none of the federal government's business. These matters - prayer and Bible reading in schools, prayers at graduation ceremonies and before football games, the public posting of the Ten Commandments, the kind of prayers chaplains in state legislatures may offer - are matters for states, cities, and schools to decide without interference from a black-robed oligarchy on the other side of the country.

Thomas Jefferson was presciently aware of the danger of an overstepping federal judiciary even in his own day. In 1821 he wrote,

"The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in  . . . the federal judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped from the states."

Part 4