Customer Reviews

Government by Judiciary

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Regardless of liberal, revisionist history, the Fourteenth Amendment was never intended to be, nor was it used by, its ratifiers to enforce thorough-going racial equality in the United States. To the contrary, the Amendment was designed to give newly emancipated slaves equality under protective laws, not equal application of all laws. In laymans terms, the Amendment guranteed minimal civil rights (the rights to enter into and enfoce contracts and police protection, but not full social or political rights. Thus, even progressive Northerners did not see state-mandated segregation as violative of the Amendment in any way. And, contemporaneous Jim-Crow legislation, both northern and southern alike, demonstrated this original, limited understanding of the scope of the Amendment.

Evil the Amendment may have been in its lack of breath, but its shortcomings were caused by the rampant racism endemic to the United States at that time, both in the North and South alike, not by Berger. To the contray, Berger merely has had the courage to stand up against contemporary, PC, soft tolitarianism and state the undeniable historical facts regarding the original meaning and application of the Fourteenth Amendment and contrast this to the more recent, revistionist reinterpretation and applications.

Looking to the bigger picture, what Berger does is challenge us to ponder whether going to all the fuss and bother of amending the Constitution to go beyond the very limited, original goals of the Fourthment Amendment might not have been a better course than giving the Supreme Court a quick-and-easy constitutional blue pen.

BTW, the "Pure Evil" review is pure crap.

This book is very true. There is an old Irish proverb, "The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions".

This book proves it.

Let's take "Brown". Now, is this poster saying that all children are not entitled to a fair education. Of course not! And it's terrible that the courts had to get involved to solve the education issue of allowing children-of-color to attend a white school. If the various governments had acted right then there would have been no reason for the courts to strike down unjust laws regarding race.

However, what is scary about "Brown" is it allows the courts to get involved in the smallest detail of public life. So, the courts were correct in helping minority children attend a school. But, the courts actions do not just stop there. Like a bite of an apples, this books shows instance after instance where the courts continously invent rights for items that were once a state matter, such as land use, or in international matters, such as when the courts were finding rights for terrorists of the IRA.

If anything this book under states the cases of too much judiciary in the goverment. The results are that various groups that make up the plantiffs of the USA have a disproportionate amount of power. Example, the ACLU has defacto established the Christmas policies of the USA with its lawsuits. No vote was ever held that removed the Christmas displays from government. It was all lawsuits.

How will this end? This poster does not know. Perhaps one day the courts will over step their authority, such as in the granting criminal rights to Terrorists at GITMO, and they will be introduced to real power.

Since the writing of this book in 1997 the role of the judiciary has expanded.

This book is four stars, dated, but is still good.

Yes, "Brown" was indeed wrong, if wrongness is judged by adherence to the Constitution, at any rate. More important, the Bill of Rights was never intended to apply to the States, but as a check against the power of the federal government. Berger is entirely consistent with the Constitutional understanding of those checks embodied in the Bill of Rights. Second, there are no such things as "civil rights." Wake up. All rights mentioned in the Constitution, if you assume that the Constitution is what it says it is, are given by a Creator (thus the "Liberty" mentioned in the Constitution is one of that Creator's "Blessings"). "Civil rights" are man-given, and man-taken-away; as such, they are worthless. "Civil rights" is chiefly a shibboleth emanating from the illegal 14th Amendment. In short, the Bill of Rights is not worth the paper it was written on if it were to apply to the States.

Berger's entire book -- in fact, pretty much his entire intellectual life -- is based on the notion that the Framers of the 14th Amendment never intended that it be applied as the courts have done, incorporating the Bill of Rights into the 14th and making them applicable to the states. Unfortunately for Berger, recent scholarship has proven conclusively that that's exactly what they intended. Check out Michael Kent Curtis' "No State Shall Abridge" or any of the books by Akhil Reed Amar. This isn't a "liberal" claim; the gun rights people relied on it to argue to the Supreme Court that the 2nd Amendment should be applied to the states.

This is a terrible book that among other things argues that
the supreme court's decison in "Brown vs. Board of Education"
(the school segregation case) was wrong.

Its all dressed up with a nice intellectual almost clinical
wrapping, but at its core is a strong belief that the expansion
of American legal rights since the Civil War is not consistant
with the constitution and that by enforcing civil rights and
equality that the courts have taken away the "rightful" powers
of the rest of the government.

The agenda here is clear. Berger is making a cold intellectual
argument for gutting the protections of the bill of rights,
granting the states their pre-civil war powers free of
the constraint of the bill of rights. And his thinking re-opens
the door to the validity of "seperate but equal", racial
discrimination, state establishments of religion.

The Bill of Rights is not worth the paper its written on if
it doesn't apply to states. And a United States where the
courts are, as Berger wants, stripped of the power to
review laws, actions of the executive and to protect rights
is a united states where freedom will be gone.