Schlafly: Is Relying On Foreign Law An Impeachable Offense?

Phyllis Schlafly, in her most recent column, suggests that it should be impeachable for the judiciary to base rulings on foreign law. And why the hell not? On what basis is this tactic employed? Could it be that the Supremes believe they answer to no one and are able to do so until death do they part?

At a time when the electorate has shown it wants a more conservative representative government, the left leaning minority is apoplectic that they may be about to lose their most effective method of passing liberal ideology--by judicial fiat.

The majority of the Supreme Court apparently has decided that enforcing popular opinion, be it domestic liberal ideology, or foreign, is just fine and dandy. That's not what the founding dad's had in mind.

Here's some of what Schlafly pointed out in her column:

The supremacist five claimed that most other countries don't execute seventeen-year-olds. However, most other countries don't have capital punishment at all, so there is no distinction between seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds.

Furthermore, most other countries don't allow jury trials or other Bill of Rights guarantees, so who knows if the accused ever gets what we would call a fair trial? Over 90 percent of jury trials are in the United States, and we certainly don't want to conform to non-jury-trial countries.

The supremacist five must think they can dictate evolution of the meaning of treaties as well as of the text of the Constitution.

They cited the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which our Senate year after year has refused to ratify. They also cited the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which we ratified only with a reservation specifically excluding the matter of juvenile capital punishment.

DC sniper Lee Malvo was seventeen during his infamous killing rampage, so now serial killers like him won't have to worry about the death penalty. The terrorists and the vicious Salvadoran gangs will be able to assign seventeen-year-olds as their hit men so they can "get away with it."

We recall that the Supreme Court ruled in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992 that it could not overturn Roe v. Wade because that might undermine "the Court's legitimacy." But in the Simmons case, the Court flatly overturned its own decision about juvenile capital punishment in Stanford v. Kentucky only 16 years ago.

As Justice Scalia pointed out in dissent, the Court's invocation of foreign law is both contrived and disingenuous. The big majority of countries reject U.S.-style abortion on demand, so the supremacist justices conveniently omitted that "international opinion."

Our runaway judiciary is badly in need of restraint by Congress. A good place to start would be a law declaring it an impeachable offense for justices to rely on foreign law in overriding the U.S. Constitution or congressional or state law.

More on Justice Scalia's critical comments of the Supreme Court rulings here and here.

Mark Levin's current best seller, Men In Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America is essential reading as is Judge Andrew Napolitano's book, Constitutional Chaos : What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws.