The Politics of Fear and the Crash of Newt Gingrich, Part II

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

    Now the bad news.  Newt Gingrich has not yet irrevocably crashed.  Thanks to this Wicked Wizard of Oz, one can argue that Americans now face one of the clearest and most extreme threats in American history to the founding principles of the American Republic.

America’s Founders carefully designed a system of government to guard against the tyranny of the democratic majority or what nowadays is called the 99%, as well as against the tyranny of a monarchy or an oligarchy of the top 1%.  The greatest danger they considered to be a demogogue who would claim to represent the people when in fact he was pushing an ideology of oligarchical tyranny allegedly on their behalf, as was so clearly demonstrated in the French Revolution and later in its totalitarian offspring known as Communism, Nazism, and Militant Zionism. 

The American republic was founded on the two principles that truth comes from God and is not man-made and that the task of the legislature is to translate the truth found in natural law, including divine revelation, into the principles and practice of justice.  Most importantly, following the wisdom of Montesquieu, they called for a strong and independent judicial system to assure that the legislative branch abides by the wisdom of past tradition and that the executive branch abides by the directions of the legislature, because otherwise governance would be subject to the emotions of the mob or to the self-interest and whims of whatever elite commands both economic and political power, which, of course, can never be separated.

Although the American Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, left out John Locke’s emphasis that wide-spread property ownership is the basis of civil government, such broadened ownership of land and capital was basic to the original intent of the Founders as expressed in the first draft of the Declaration drafted by George Mason and adopted on May 15, 1776, by the Virginia Convention.  Section One of this Declaration of Rights reads: “That all men are by nature equally free and independent and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety”.  George Mason and Patrick Henry never signed the final draft of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th because it lacked a Bill of Rights confirming the natural law of universal access to property ownership in the production of wealth.

The first U.S. Supreme Court started as wishful thinking, but the first Chief Justice, John Marshal, who served for a quarter century, built it into a third branch of government equal to the first two, and so it remained until recent times when the extremists of both right and left started attacking it as an agent of judicial legislation incompatible with the original intent of America’s Founders. 

The American Revolution was not a revolution in the modern secular sense of destroying the institutions of governance.  Rather it was a reformation to bring out the best of the past in the present to shape the future, which the mercantilist English parliament was abandoning in what we nowadays would call the Neo-Conservative doctrine of unilateral preemption. 

The self-styled great historian, Newt Gingrich, knows this but denies it when he announces that as president he would ignore the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, invest unlimited power in the executive branch, and impose his own will.  In fact, he has announced that if he could do so he would eliminate the Supreme Court altogether, rather than ask for Congressional confirmation of judges who would adhere to strict construction calling for both economic and political democracy. 

Instead of calling, as did President Ronald Reagan, for a Second American Revolution to provide universal individual ownership of productive wealth in an economic democracy as the essential means to support political democracy, Newt Gingrich calls for the elimination of the U.S. Supreme Court, which exists precisely to monitor the conformity of the legislative and executive branches to the original intent of America’s Founders. 

In reaction to Gingrich’s bizarre rejection of America’s fundamental principles of just governance the experts on constitutional government either express deep concern or dismiss him as a joke.  In the New York Times of December 19th, Adam Liptak quotes leading representatives of both reactions.  He writes, “In interviews and a white paper posted on his web site, Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, called for the abolition of courts that issued decisions he found questionable and for subpoenaing judges to explain unpopular rulings. ... The American legal establishment is not sure what to make of Newt Gingrich’s mounting attacks on the independence of the federal judiciary.  Reactions vary from amusement to alarm.  What is hard to find is approval.  Michael B. Mukasy, who was attorney general under President George W. Bush, said he grew slack-jawed in amazement as he listened to Mr. Gingrich’s argument that the elected branches should be free to ignore judicial decisions.  ‘It would lead us to become a banana republic, in which administrations would become regimes, and each regime would feel it perfectly appropriate to disregard decisions of courts staffed by previous regimes’, Mr. Mukasey said.  ‘That’s not what we are’.  Michael W. McConnell, a retired federal appeals court judge who was appointed by Mr. Bush and now teaches law at Stanford, said he was less concerned, but only because Mr. Gingrich’s proposals are so far-fetched.  ‘If these things were actually done, it would be scary’, he said.  ‘Loose talk is not scary’.”

Unfortunately, loose talk by a man who incredibly is still the front-runner in the Republican primaries is not a joke.  It is not a joke when such a man runs for the presidency of the United States of America on a platform based on his claim that the executive is the principal power in America, that the Palestinians have never existed, that Iran must be bombed in order to assure that Washington’s writ will become law all over planet earth, and that this is necessary in order to counter the “totalitarian threat of Islam to the free world”.