The President of the United States could, and perhaps should, keep the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, DC, this summer by executive order, especially given the mess that they have helped create with Tom Homan, current head of ICE, as he seeks to discharge the directives the President has given him to get these horrific illegal alien criminals, child rapists and terrorists, out of the country.
Tom Homan commented on the news the other night there are 700,000 of them. He added: “That’s the number.” President Trump, speaking into a reporter’s microphone on Air Force One this past week said, “They want each one to have a trial. What’s a trial take? About a week?”
With all this going on our nine U.S. Supreme Court judges are about to leave us all high and dry to figure it all out without them as they have already begun to pack their bags and make their reservations online for their traditional 3 month vacation (part of June, all of July, August and September, up until they return in October). Our liberal Supreme Court judges in order to top up their already inflated egos, go on speaking tours in Europe – they walk over.
When Nancy Pelosi was Speaker of the House and Chuck Schumer was Speaker of the Senate, they held the House and Senate in session until they pushed through a bill they wanted to see passed. They would do this before the Christmas holidays, etc. It got results.
The House and the Senate are, of course, representatives of the people who elected them. Each chamber elects their own Speaker, and that person is the boss of the House or the boss of the Senate. Someone might say that the Speaker is indirectly elected by the people. He or she has the power to keep that chamber in session.
The President of the United States is elected by the people. He appoints Supreme Court judges with the advice and consent of the Senate. We might say that they are indirectly chosen by the people. But who is their boss when it comes to holding them in town when there is a federal judicial crisis? Certainly not the Court itself or its Chief Judge because he and the other judges can’t wait to get out of town and hide while the fireworks fly this 4th of July over the mess they have helped create.
Under the Constitution Supreme Court judges are appointed to serve for life during which time their salaries cannot be reduced. They were purposely not given their own building by our forefathers who instead wanted them to ‘ride the circuit’ – going to the people instead of requiring the people to come to them and sitting in the court in major cities of the nation.
The Constitution says nothing about their vacation. They simply gave it to themselves. How many hardworking members of John Q. Public whose tax dollars go, by direct deposit, into the judges bank accounts while they are out of town all summer long, would like to have the summer off themselves?
The Court went unchallenged when they took the summers off during the days before air conditioning was invented. Once their building became air conditioned they continued the tradition of taking the summer off. Washington, DC, which is built largely on a swamp, was known for its hot, sticky, sultry summers.
Hagerstown, Maryland, where my office is located, is located down in a valley at the base of Camp David. Pen Mar Park is at the top of the mountain. People come in the summer to picnic and there is a dance pavilion with Glen Miller type bands playing swing music. There are a number of restored large frame houses from the Pen Mar era leftover from the days when trains came from Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington, DC, dead ending at the top of the mountain at Pen Mar where people came to escape the heat and unsanitary conditions of the cities in the hot summer months.
Congressmen, senators, and major business leaders of Washington, DC, built these large frame houses that their wives and children stayed in during the summer months (it was also a recreational park for children in those days having little toy trains that they could ride, a merry-go-round, etc.) while the husbands commuted from Washington, leaving the Capital on Friday evening and coming up to Pen Mar at the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains to be with their wives and children for the weekend. At Pen Mar they sometimes needed a light blanket to sleep at night while back in Washington whenever something went wrong it was like a cold night – everybody was trying to cover up.
So when the U.S. Supreme Court judges gave themselves a 3 or 4 month vacation all summer long (they didn’t have to commute), it was before the days of air conditioning or for that matter even before the days of refrigeration.
An “ice box” in a home was just that – a wooden box in the top of which was placed a large block of ice. Cold air flows to the shelves beneath.
The U.S. Supreme Court today is fully and comfortably air conditioned as are the homes, workplaces, and even the factories in the nation. The Supreme Court continues to complain about the workload of the Court. They say they receive approximately 10,000 requests to hear a case on appeal, but can only hear a small number of those that will fit within the “term of court”. Would any other federal employee like to get 12 months of direct deposit salary into their bank account while working only an 8 or 9 month ‘term of work’ in any given year.
Many people feel that our forefathers were inspired in writing our Constitution and setting up the country. Their memories were very recent of those powdered wig high court judges back in England. They grew puffed up with power. It is for this reason that our forefathers made no provision for the U.S. Supreme Court to have its own building. They did provide Congress with its own building (the Capitol) and the chief executive with his own building (the White House).
They gave the Supreme Court a stage coach with which to ‘ride the circuit’ (to go from one big city to another) and set up court there. They were forced to beg space over the market house in New York where they would hold court in a large upstairs room while beneath was the people’s market with the flies and the smells from the fish and the poultry, the piglets and rotting vegetables came in through the open windows above.
It was Chief Judge John Marshall, distant cousin of President Thomas Jefferson, who became jealous of Jefferson back in the White House sampling his madeira wine while he meanwhile was covered in dust from the long stage coach ride and full of mud having to get out of the stage coach and help push it out of the mud ruts when it became stuck. He begged Congress for permission to park the stage coach and give him and his court space in the Capitol Building to hold court. Congress relented and gave them a cellar-type room that had been used as a file room directly beneath the floor of the Senate (figuratively and literally beneath the people’s representatives.
Egos march ever onward, and as the country grew, we added new states and with each new state we added 2 new Senators. When the Senate outgrew its old chamber and moved into larger quarters in the Capitol, the U.S. Supreme Court simply walked up the steps and got dibs on the old Senate chamber where they remained as a court until Chief Judge Taft (the only U.S. president to also serve as Chief Justice). He said he did the presidency for his wife, but his heart was with the court.
Taft twisted arms and lobbied the Congress to get them to appropriate a large sum of money to build the present Supreme Court Building in 1934 directly across the street east of the Capitol. Good Heavens! It looks like a temple on the Acropolis in Ancient Greece, or a temple of the gods that has descended out of the clouds from Mt. Olympus in which the judges have taken up residence. Some of them walk the marble halls trailing their ermine robes and hurling their thunderbolts (i.e. Roe v. Wade) at their supplicants (We the People) from their lofty perch with its long white marble stairs ascending to the base of its large 6 ton brass doors and gargantuan Corinthian columns that soar heavenward. What’s the old expression? Egos expand to fill the space allotted to them.
The 9 Supreme Court get up in the morning and put their pants and skirts on the same way the rest of us do. They are federal employees whose salaries are paid by we the people. They are needed in town this summer. There is no reason they should be allowed to take more than a one or two week vacation – like the rest of hardworking citizens try to squeeze out.
President Trump can and should by executive order cancel their desertion of their air conditioned building for 3 months this summer and require that they stay in town and tend to business especially during this summer of all summers when they are needed most.
They have already cleared the docket for the summer anyway, and having decided the ‘rights’ of criminal illegal aliens come ahead of the rights of legitimate U.S. citizens who they may have even raped and murdered, why not have Tom Homan load up some of the worst of the worst and bus them to the Supreme Court so they can help out by holding a few “due process hearings” themselves deciding whether Homan should release them into the judges’ own neighborhoods or continue with his plan to get them out of the country.
A number of years ago when I was growing up in the Washington metropolitan area, there was an interesting item in the newspaper that I shall always remember. People in Washington, DC, continually implored the City Council to do something about the rat infestation problem. Nothing got done. Whereupon one man took it upon himself to catch a bunch of rats and release them late at night in the City Councilmen’s front yards. You can guess what the first item on the agenda was at the next City Council meeting: “What is to be done about the rat infestation problem in Washington, DC?”
Our good president, not unacquainted with the courts to which they are always dragging him, was given a mandate to get these rats out of the country. The President has turned Tom Homan, as Director of ICE, loose to enforce the law and carry out the will of the people.
Meanwhile every Tom, Dick and Harry who can jump in front of a camera (mayors of ‘sanctuary cities’ and lawyers from the ACLU – “Anti-Christian Liberties Union”) are fighting against Tom Homan. To top it off, the U.S. Supreme Court itself is throwing a monkey wrench into the gears of the lawful orderly removal of the rats. I’m not advocating that Tom Homan turn a bus load of rats loose in the neighborhoods of some of these Supreme Court judges. I am simply trying to be a little voice out in the hinterland speaking out for the people. They could reduce everything I have just said to six words: “WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!”
Back to our forefather’s wisdom of no single, solitary, permanent courthouse for our Supreme Court judges. Rather, they wanted them to ‘ride the circuit’ and go to the people. Curiously, perhaps providentially, the federal court system is divided into 12 circuits. There are 12 months in the year. If the Supreme Court is required beginning January 1st to ride the circuit in a modern stage coach (jet airplane) they would be spending one month in each of the 12 cities in which the federal Court of Appeals for that circuit is located. They could take their law clerks with them or their law clerks could work from home employing the modern technology of the internet and video conferencing with their judges.
As an example, my office is located in Hagerstown, Maryland. The state of Maryland is part of the 4th circuit (made up of Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia). The federal Court of Appeals for the 4th circuit to which I go when I argue a case is located in Richmond, Virginia. I just happened to stay at an old restored historic hotel known as “The Jefferson Hotel” located in Richmond up the street from the Appellate Court. I learned from one of the bellhops that some of the judges of that Appellate Court also stay at the Jefferson for its convenient location close to the court. They try to keep it a secret but bellhops always know.
The Appellate Courthouse in Richmond, as you can imagine, has any number of courtrooms located within it. Courtroom 1 has beautifully carved American eagles instead of legs holding up the trial tables. If the nine Supreme Court judges were to come and sit in Richmond for a month, and the other federal judges of the courthouse wanted to kowtow to them, they would probably land in this fancy courtroom. They are not superior in intellect to any of the other courts of appeal judges. Some court of appeals judges may be more superior but haven’t been elevated politically to the Supreme Court itself. Their feeling of superiority comes from the court building that was given to them by the taxpayers in 1936. It is impressive and imposing – not unlike a temple of the gods.
The law is nothing but common sense made difficult and the great secret of all judges is that they first decide how they want a case to come out (given their personal prejudices and predilections, i.e., Roe v. Wade) then they look around for the law to do it. If they can’t find the law to do it, they read between the lines (‘interpret’ the law – of which Roe v. Wade is a classic example).
If they are asked over the back fence, “Why did you do thus and so in such and such a case? they reply, “I had no choice. The law (their ‘interpretation’ of the Constitution) made me do it.” In fact, they made the law do it, ‘interpreting’ the Constitution to suit themselves.
It was Bishop Hoadley, in his 1717 sermon before King George I, who said, “Whoever has an absolute Authority to interpret any written, or spoken Laws; it is He, who is truly the Law-giver, to all Intents and Purposes; and not the Person who first wrote, or spoke them.”
It’s all a charade. It’s all a bunch of foolishness. “Man, Man, Oh foolish Man.”
The case law and the opinions of this court do not move ever upward to ultimate wisdom. It moves up and down like the needle on a seismograph and it sometimes drops off the chart as with an earthquake (Roe v. Wade).
The second executive order would not be doing something new but simply restoring something old – the wisdom of our forefathers by which, commencing on January 1st, 2026, Supreme Court judges shall be put to riding the circuit dividing their time between the 12 federal court circuits spending one month hearing cases ripe for Supreme Court docket review emanating from the states within that circuit. They will be given an opportunity to speak over lunch with those federal court of appeals judges who just finished hearing the cases and know most about them – another way in which President Trump in concert with our forefathers wisdom would be improving the administration of justice.
Being appointed as a Supreme Court judge is an opportunity to invest one’s legal acumen and talent in this too short life in trust for the benefit of one’s fellow man. It’s not something to become all puffed up about; don a kingly robe, pick up a golden scepter, and seat oneself on the marble halled dais aloof from your fellow man.
If those of you who agree that 2 executive orders are needed immediately, one in May to stop these judges from leaving town and hiding during the summer months leaving the rest of us, including the president, to figure it out.
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