A CHRISTIAN PRESIDENT CRUZ COULD END THE REPUBLIC
Snake Plissken: Got a smoke?
Malloy: The United States is a non-smoking country. No smoking. No drinking, no drugs. No moral crimes. No women — unless you’re married. No foul language.
Snake Plissken: Land of the free.
Escape from LA (1996) (Envisioning a future man of God as President).
I am a Christian first. I am an American second.
Senator Ted Cruz (January 20, 2016).
Ted Cruz is devoted to the Constitution. Or so he says. He should know the document. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he clerked for Justice Rehnquist and later appeared before the Court.
And yet Cruz dos not believe citizens are required to follow the Rule of Law as articulated by the Court. With respect to a Kentucky clerk who refused to follow the law and issue a wedding license to a same-sex couple, Cruz said the following:
“Why was Kim Davis jailed? First, the Supreme Court’s fundamentally illegitimate gay marriage option. Five unelected lawyers declared themselves, in Justice Scalia’s words, the “rulers” of 320 million Americans, insisting that their radical view of marriage — contrary to the biblical definition, to the understanding of marriage that predated America by millennia — would be forced on the rest of us. That was not law. Court’s don’t make law. And that was not the Constitution.”
(Ted Cruz Epilogue in A Time for Action by Rafael Cruz).
When asked in Iowa if he believed courts can make the law, Cruz responded “Not Remotely.” The case Cruz is referring to is Obergefell v. Hodges, a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held in a 5-4 decision that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. When “five unelected lawyers” interpret the Amendment differently than what was intended by the original ratifiers, they, in a Ted Cruz world, act outside the law. In his words, “The Court is making the preposterous assumption that the People of the United States somehow silently redefined marriage in 1868 when they ratified the 14th Amendment.”
In a NPR interview on June 28, 2015, Cruz made his point. “These judges and justices are disregarding their oaths.” So if the Supreme Court is not the law of the land and the Supreme Court is illegally and wrongly interpreting the Constitution, who can be allowed to properly interpret the Constitution? The logical answer, to Cruz, are those who disagree with the Supreme Court, starting with the President of the United States. From the same interview:“The parties to a case cannot ignore a direct judicial order, but it does not mean that those who are not parties to a case are bound by a judicial order.” The Kentucky clerk who refused to issue a marriage license she was required to by the Supreme Court was not acting illegally because she was not bound by the Supreme Court decision. When God’s law applies, laws written by men are no longer valid.
Under the Constitution, the President is required to “faithfully execute the laws of the United States.” To Cruz, this dictate is at best a vague suggestion. If he does not like a law, he is free, as President, to rescind the law through executive decree. He has already said as much with respect to Obama’s Iran agreement by promising to “cancel the Iran deal” on his first day of office despite his legal obligation to fulfill the agreement under both Constitutional and International law. Such a view means a Cruz President is free to declare any Supreme Court opinion invalid, because he like the Kentucky clerk, not the Supreme Court, is the final arbiter of what the law means.
What Supreme Court opinions would a President Cruz likely declare unenforceable? The list starts with those opinions that violate God’s law. To Cruz, God’s law trumps the Constitution.
“It is exactly right that in terms of who I am, I am a Christian first. I am an American second. I’m a conservative third. And I’m a Republican fourth.”
”Cruz says the establishment has bailed on Rubio to get behind Trump,” Washington Post, January 20, 2016. As a “Christian,” Cruz is quite open about his agenda.
During the past 50 years, the Court has condemned millions of innocent unborn children to death, banished God from our schools and public squares, extend constitutional protections to prisoners of war on foreign soil, authorized the confiscation of property from one private owner to transfer it to another, and has now required all Americans to purchase a specific product, and to accept the redefinition of an institution ordained by God and long predating the formation of the Court.
Ted Cruz, Constitutional Remedies for a Lawless Court, National Review Online, June 26, 2015.
A President who believes the Supreme Court to be a lawless institution and that he is free to terminate any law he disagrees with by executive decree, is a President who has the potential to become a religious dictator. As a Christian first, God’s law arguably compels him to assume such a role. If a Kentucky clerk is not bound by the Supreme Court, why should an elected President be so bound?
A Christian President Cruz would, by executive decree, certainly rescind Roe v. Wade and the Court’s rule extending equal rights to same-sex couples. The holdings of Edward v. Aguillard (declaring unconstitutional a law requiring the teaching of creation science in public schools) and Epperson v. Arkansas (holding a statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution to be unconstitutional) are violations of God’s law as taught at Cruz’s high school: Houston Second Baptist. If Cruz’s Constitutional interpretation is accepted, all Supreme Court decisions that do not reflect the original intent of those who ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868 and its guarantee of equal protection under the law, would at risk. This would require revisiting the case of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and its rule of law that racial segregation is unconstitutional. Far-fetched? Consider the opinion of Justice Rehnquist, the justice Ted Cruz worked for. In 1952, using the exact argument Cruz relies on in condemning the same-sex marriage case (not contemplated in 1868), Rehnquist, then a Supreme Court clerk, argued, “I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by “liberal” colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be re-affirmed . . . To those who would argue that personal rights are more sacrosanct than property rights, the short answer is that the Constitution makes no such distinction. Attempts to protect minority rights of any kind can only be . . . considered the sentiments of a transient majority of nine men.” John Dean, The Rehnquist Choice, 275 (The Free Press 2001). Or five lawyers who have lawlessly decreed that same-sex couples have the same rights as the rest of us. Welcome to the world view of Ted Cruz, the Christian President.
The founding fathers understood all too well that no one branch of government could have too much power. That is why they created a judiciary separate from the legislative and executive branches of government. The Supreme Court was put in place to prevent other branches of government from violating the Constitution and as a check to protect rights created by the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment. As Justice Marshall stated in Marbury v. Madison over 200 years ago, “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.” Even a remote possibility of a Christian Presidency should be sufficient to reject Cruz as a viable President. The founders understood, if Cruz does not, that vesting too much power in one person leads to dictatorship in lieu of a democratic republic. When leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, Ben Franklin was asked what had been created. His famous answer was “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Franklin, you see, had read Plutarch on absolute power and the fall of the Roman Republic.
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Frankalina is a nickname given to Frank W. Mitchell by his daughter Delia. Frank is a trial lawyer, writer, and an adjunct professor at UNLV who lives in Las Vegas, Nevada.