Your assertion that O.W. Holmes body of 1881 lectures was the beginning and Jerome Frank’s a continuation of the attack on the validity of English Common Law is correct. While the claim cannot be denied; it does not validate the practice. The widely held belief by the citizenry that judges are impartial ‘dispensers’ of justice is one of the basic principles of our Republic. When that ‘impartiality’ disappears so will the Republic.

The three basic ‘rights’ attributed to our form of government are;

• Representative Democracy – A form of government founded on the principle of elected individuals representing the people, as opposed to either autocracy or direct democracy.

• Property Rights – Modern property rights conceive of ownership and possession as belonging to legal individuals, even if the legal individual is not a real person. Property rights are protected in the current laws of states usually found in the form of a constitution or a bill of rights. The United States Constitution provides explicitly for the protection of private property in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments.

• Rule of Law – also called supremacy of law, is a general legal maxim according to which decisions should be made by applying known principles or laws, WITHOUT the intervention of discretion in their application.

These three initiatives represent the difference between all other forms of government on this planet, and the government created for us by our Founding Fathers.

I submit that since its inception; and particularly within the last three generations, that liberal/progressives have been involved in systematically destroying each of these three maxims. They have literally rewritten the social contract between government and the people.

Representative Democracy – I do not believe that anyone can argue that the first nail in the coffin of representative democracy was the Seventeenth Amendment. Until 1913 Senators were appointed by their respective State Legislatures. This was in order to ensure that States were adequately represented at the federal level. Senators that refused to do the bidding of those state houses were subject to immediate recall. Once the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, the states lost all federal representation, and a Senate race became an extension of the same popularity contest that Congressional Representative elections had become. Once liberals had accomplished this, they knew it was just a matter of time before a majority of Americans would perceive that they could get federal representatives to ‘give’ them things from the treasury in the form of entitlements.

You cannot find a Senator on the Hill today that would describe our government as anything other than a ‘democracy’. There are certainly none among the ‘publically’ schooled that would correct them. The ‘Tyranny of the Majority’ has been embedded in federal government ever since. Proof of this is the current movement to invalidate the Electoral College. While I will acknowledge that several states are attempting to regain their influence by drafting legislation specifying their Tenth Amendment rights. I feel this to be an inadequate route. The liberal/progressives of this country are pushing the country toward pure democracy; majority rule. If this is allowed, the Republic is dead.

Case in point: The Second Amendment leaves no doubt as to its original intent. However there have been numerous legal battles especially in the last 70 years where Second Amendment advocates have had to resort to more exacting legal specification as to what a person’s right to ‘Keep & Bear Arms’ actually IS. D.C. vs. Heller is just the latest stop in a journey that began almost four generations ago. A constitutional amendment says exactly what it means, but liberal/progressives have clouded the meaning of the wording to the point where we’ve GIVEN IN to their definition of what they understand the amendment to say, and have been fighting one legal battle after another to attempt to retain what was originally a guaranteed right.

Property Rights – The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee private property rights within the United States. Anyone familiar with the findings of Kelo vs. City of New London cannot arrive at any other conclusion than to agree that private property rights are threatened. When a court affirms that private property may be taken for the ‘public good’ with ‘public good’ being defined as increased city tax revenue through the redevelopment of that property; then no personal real property is safe from government confiscation. As with the outlining of the questions regarding the Second Amendment above, liberal/progressives have once again warped original meaning to the point where individual state legislatures have had to become involved to stop the progressives from defining all real property as belonging to the state.

Rule of Law – Originally intended to guarantee the right of any free man to petition the courts for resolution of a conflict and be assured that the forthcoming decision had precedent.

We now suffer under an imperial judiciary. A group of lifetime appointed egalitarians, who hold the hubris to believe themselves to be possessed of the knowledge and experience too arbitrarily decide what is best for the ‘unwashed masses’. We’ve already covered the effects this ‘imperial judiciary’ has had on all three of America’s most important political areas.

Fast forward to today. We have an overreaching federal government that has ‘taken over’ a significant portion of the banking system, owns the single largest insurance company in the US, and has majority positions in two of the largest American manufacturing concerns. The President has dismissed a CEO, has established a task force to guide the manufacturing concerns, and desires to drive up energy prices to the point where alternative power generation techniques may actually look cost effective. He also craves to control 20% of the economy through the establishment of a government run health care program. Add to this the Treasury’s recent proposal to give the FED the power to proactively seize any company that may, in their own determination, threaten what they believe to be the best interest of the American People.

Not only has the judiciary been silent as the government has taken these powers unto themselves, but we are now faced with an administration SCOTUS nominee that considers that her gender, ethnic background, and socio-economic status grants her the ability to render ‘superior’ judgments to other socio-economic and ethnic groups. Not only does she consider this to be true, but has faithfully articulated this in several public forums.

The “Rule of Law” maxim is intended to be a safeguard against ‘arbitrary’ governance. The word “arbitrary” signifies a judgment made at the DISCRESSION of the arbiter, rather than ACCORDING to the rule of law.

In Judge Sonia Sotomayor we have a nominee seeking a life-time appointment to the highest court in the land, who has announced up front that she believes in her ability to render a ‘superior’ arbitration decision. She has also announced her intention to do exactly that upon elevation to SCOTUS, turning “Rule of Law’ on its head in favor of acting as an arbiter of social justice.

Social justice is dangerous on several levels. First; it is generally thought of as a world or country which affords all individuals an impartial share in the BENEFITS of a society regardless of their contribution TO that society. Second; it aims to achieve this ‘sameness’ through the use of progressive taxation, and outright income & property redistribution. Its ultimate purpose is to produce equality of outcome. In other words; ‘sameness’ as opposed to equality.

I submit that we are on the precipice. The elevation of this woman to SCOTUS when added to the political bent of the present administration will bankrupt this country; both ideologically and financially. It will result in the destruction of the grand experiment this country embarked upon almost 233 years ago, and render the sacrifice of our Founding Fathers worthless. But then again, what could they possibly know? They were just a bunch of “white males”.