Chatter and sincere efforts to impeach lawfare judges handing out political favors disguised as legal rulings from their judicial throne is never going to amount to much more than fading headline news. It is time to end judicial immunity for judges.
End it through constitutional amendments, state by state, and federally by amending the U.S. Constitution. It’s not too late to listen to Thomas Jefferson.
Even if, by some miracle, Congress jumps through all the hoops to land a despotic judge in the hot seat, it still doesn’t threaten a judge’s fat paycheck and pensions. More importantly, impeachment is an empty, elusive deterrent that leaves the victims of a judge’s lawless rulings with zero recourse.
The arrest of rogue judges like Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan, who used the bench to aid and abet a criminal, was an unusual step in the right direction, but wait for it. It’s coming: She’ll wiggle out of it through the escape hatch called judicial immunity.
In other words, thanks to the shield of steel that judges gave themselves long ago, they can do whatever they want and get away with it.
If one of the illegal aliens these impervious judges are ordering to stay put or be returned to America goes off and rapes and murders someone’s daughter, the almighty judge can’t be sued because of the immunity he enjoys.
Her family would have a better chance of suing the flight attendant who helped deplane the deportees or the cop who escorted the busload of them back onto U.S. soil — just not these black-robed self-appointed gods whom we must rise to greet whenever they enter a room.
And they know it. Absolute immunity is the ultimate safety net. “Bet it all, because you won’t lose a thing” is basically what immunity says to judges.
Without consequences, the sacred checks and balances that the framers of the Constitution so carefully built into our system of government go out the window, at least when it comes to judges. The eighteenth-century French philosopher Montesquieu, who invented the concept of “separation of powers” in his famous premonitory treatise “The Spirit of the Laws,” must be rolling in his grave.
Then came Jefferson, warning that it is a “very dangerous doctrine” to make judges “the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions.” Because it would, as he prophetically wrote back in 1820 to his pal William Charles Jarvis in his now famed Jefferson papers, “place us under the despotism of an Oligarchy.”
“Our judges are as honest as other men,” Jefferson wrote, “and not more so.” Put judicial review in the hands of Congress, he warned, or else we’ll be sorry.
The heavily-guarded landmark 1978 ruling Sparkman v. Stump, shielding judges from accountability, sealed the reality of just how right Jefferson was. Indiana Judge Harold Stump, in a repugnant abuse of the Judiciary, ordered 15-year-old Linda Spitler to undergo sterilization surgery at her deranged parents’ request as their answer to concerns that she wasn’t smart enough not to get pregnant. It was only when Spitler married, with dreams of having children, that she discovered she had been sterilized. Devastated, Spitler, whose married name at the time was Sparkman, sued the judge.
But alas, Judge Stump successfully asserted judicial immunity, as upheld by his equally immune peers. He cited no statutory authority, followed no due process, and didn’t bother to so much as appoint the young teen a guardian ad litem. He even sanctioned the big lie she was told that the surgery was a routine appendectomy.
Judge Stump was liability-free from the lifelong damage he caused Sparkman. She even wrote a book about the devastation called The Blanket She Carried, a reflection on the children she could never have because of this spurious appointed king.
Judge Stump’s decision, which was quickly affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 5-to-3 vote, has been relentlessly regarded as one of the most controversial court rulings in U.S. history. And yet it remains.
“Disagreement with the action taken by a judge does not justify depriving him of his immunity, and, thus, the fact that, in this case, tragic consequences ensued from the judge’s action does not deprive him of his immunity,” wrote Justice Byron White, none other than a leftist Democrat, in delivering the majority opinion in the case.
In giving the dissenting opinion, Judge Potter Stewart, appointed by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, recognized and thus spotlighted the wild things that immunity allows judges to do, writing, “A judge is not free like a loose cannon to inflict indiscriminate damage whenever he announces that he is acting in his judicial capacity.”
And yet — they are.
I once asked an attorney I was interviewing for a story: If a judge ordered me to murder someone, and I didn’t, could I be held in contempt by the judge? The answer was a resounding, eye-opening yes.
Get rid of immunity.
Federal court judges like James Boasberg have already unholstered their peremptory weapons of contempt against our nation’s commander in chief for rightfully exercising his executive authority. Let a panel of the people, not judges or politicians, decide if victims of reckless judges have a case against them. That should quash this smokescreen of an excuse malfeasant judges peddle about being subject to frivolous lawsuits.
Good judges should have nothing to fear. We have everything to fear if we don’t end what really isn’t judicial immunity at all, but rather an iron-fisted, unchecked forum at liberty to punch the life out of America’s rule of law, its checks and balances, and the basic functions of the presidency.
Alice Giordano is an investigative reporter for Newsmax Magazine, a conservative commentator for Newsweek’s Topic of The Day, and a contributor to The Federalist. She also writes a weekly column for The Boston Broadside and is a former senior correspondent for The Epoch Times, Associated Press, and The Boston Globe.
Image via Picryl.
This article was originally published at www.americanthinker.com
