Jon Christian Ryter -- Cronyism on the High Court, Part 1 of 2

CRONYISM ON THE HIGH COURT
PART 1 of 2

By Jon Christian Ryter

October 15, 2005

NewsWithViews.com

There is a historic precedent in American president's appointing friends, allies and minions to berths on the US Supreme Court. The practice is as old as the presidency itself. John Jay, whom George Washington picked as the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Rutledge, Robert Harrison, William Paterson (who was picked by Washington to replace Thomas Johnson who replaced Rutledge when he quit in 1791 to become Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court), and James Wilson were all closely connected to Washington in different ways during the Revolutionary War.

Out of the eleven jurists Washington named to the Supreme Court during his 8-years as President, six served with him in some capacity during the Revolutionary War. Washington picked them not because they were "experienced" jurists or had a vast amount of knowledge about the recently ratified Constitution. Washington picked them because he knew them and because all of them were politically and philosophically Federalists. When John Jay resigned from the high court in 1795 to run for governor of New York, Washington made the first "recess appointment," installing his friend John Rutledge as Chief Justice.

The Senate, however, rejected Rutledge because the militant jurist had spoke out against Jay's Treaty and because when Rutledge's wife died he fell to pieces and spent time in an insane asylum. Washington appointed another cohort, William Cushing who served as the Vice President of the Constitutional Convention to replace Jay. Because his health was poor, Cushing reconsidered his nomination and declined the post. Ultimately Washington selected a candidate based on his constitutional qualifications�the yardstick by which candidates were measured until Abraham Lincoln picked Salmon Portland Chase to replace Roger Taney as Chief Justice on Dec. 6, 1864. Washington selected Oliver Ellsworth as the second Chief Justice. Ellsworth was one of the five men who drafted the Constitution. He was, without a doubt, the most qualified man in history to lead the high court.

Salmon Portland Chase was the least qualified person to sit on the high court until President George W. Bush nominated his legal adviser, Harriet Miers to replace Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor on October 7, 2005.

Chase's nomination was purely political. The Jacobins who controlled the Republican Party wanted Chase�a former Ohio governor, banker, and head of the Free Soil Party (that merged with the Whigs and the anti-Masons to became the Republican Party)�to lead the court in order to reshape the nation during Reconstruction. Chase's mission was to deflect legal challenges from the States when a permanent central bank was legislated. Lincoln hated Chase, but appointed his former Treasury Secretary as Chief Justice because he was pressured to do so by the Jacobins. Chase was confirmed by a voice vote. Not even the Senate Jacobins who shouted "yea" wanted their names attached to that confirmation.

Five years later Ulysses S. Grant appointed former Secretary of War Edwin Stanton�another Jacobin�to the high court. Stanton, like Chase before him, was a crony appointment. Stanton was confirmed on a 46 to 11 vote on Dec. 20, 1869. He died before he could be seated on the high court. Stanton should never have been nominated since he was implicated by Col. Lafayette C. Baker (who headed the presidential protection detail in the newly formed Secret Service) in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln.

In his deathbed confession, Baker implicated Stanton, 11 members of the Jacobin Congress, 12 US Army officers, 3 US Navy officers and 24 civilians. Five of the civilians were extremely influential bankers, 11 were industrialists of "...great repute and wealth." After several unsuccessful attempts by the conspirators to assassinate Baker in order to prevent him from incriminating them, he was poisoned on Jan. 12, 1868. Baker finally died on June 3, 1868. His doctor claimed he died of typhoid fever and sealed his coffin. His body was never examined. Baker's confession�and his accusation�which has also never been examined, remains in the National Archive.

History is replete with instances of cronyism in the appointment of Supreme Court Justices. The appointments of Chase and Stanton were among the worst in the 19th century. The appointment of Abe Fortas by Lyndon B. Johnson ranks as the worst in the 20th century. But the president who fine-tuned the art using cronyism to select nominees for the high court was Franklin D. Roosevelt. Only Washington placed more judges on the Supreme Court than Roosevelt. After Roosevelt attempted to add additional justices on the Supreme Court so he could control how the high court's rulings impacted the New Deal that was currently being overruled on Constitutional grounds by the Hughes Court, he managed to entice Associate Justices Willis Van Devanter and George Sutherland to retire by getting Congress to pass a law allowing federal judges to retire at age 70 with 100% of the income they earned as jurists. In six years, two thirds of the high court retired or died, giving FDR a bonanza of vacancies for him to fill.

FDR's appointments to the high court were all made with one core objective in mind: finding men who would agree to protect the New Deal laws even though almost all of them violated the Constitutional separation of powers, or the Bill of Rights.

FDR appointed cronies, minions and party hacks. If Roosevelt had not had an overwhelming majority of New Dealers in the House and Senate from 1937 to 1943, he would never have gotten Hugo Black, Stanley Reed, Felix Frankfurter, James Byrnes, William O. Douglas and Harlan Stone through the vetting process. Black, Frankfurter and Byrnes engineered most of the New Deal. It was clear that all of FDR's choices were being placed on the high court solely to protect the New Deal laws at all costs.

America�and the US Senate�believed Roosevelt when he said he knew he character of the unqualified men with no judicial record he was nominating to the high court. In truth, FDR did know the character of those he appointed. That's why he appointed them. They were lackeys to his socialist "New Deal agenda." The New Deal, like the "greater democracy" of Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society, was an attempt by the political left to break the spine of the Constitution, dilute the liberties provided to Americans into conditional rights that can be granted or retracted by the government, and convert the American Republic into a socialist democracy. Unfortunately for America in 1937 the American people, who were still largely political novices, believed their national leaders would do them no harm.

America believed Roosevelt when he assured the public that those he nominated would be stalwart protectors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Yet, at their hands, the worst deconstructions of liberty occurred as the Hughes Court, fearing that FDR's next attempt to stack the high court would succeed began to legislate from the bench. The high court, even before Van Devanter and Sutherland retired, had been politicized by FDR. FDR's cronies found easy confirmations in the New Deal Senate. Once confirmed, they went back and redressed several of the New Deal laws that had previously been overturned as unconstitutional.

One-by-one, the New Deal Court decided that, due to the ongoing national emergency that was triggered by the Depression of 1929 a decade earlier, Congress and FDR'S Solicitor General insisted it was justified in blurring the separation of powers and granting the president extraordinary power he did not constitutionally possess. Even though the national emergency brought on by the Depression of 1929 has long since vanished, all presidents still retain those unconstitutional powers even though Congress theoretically limited those powers with the National Emergencies Act that was signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1976.

While his attempt to convert the high court into an instrument of the White House failed in 1937, Roosevelt nevertheless succeeded in protecting the New Deal, which is all he wanted. The ideologues behind both major parties realized that by controlling the philosophical slant of the high court, it was possible not only to safeguard prior judicial decisions, protect unconstitutional legislation that Congress wants implemented, but it also opened the door for the courts to "clarify" vague statutes in those laws in order to dispense equality through social justice that could not have been successfully legislated by Congress without voter backlash. That is what happens on the high court when presidents are allowed to install cronies or otherwise constitutionally unqualified people�many of whom are not even jurists�on the bench.

Presidents and Congress since the end of World War I when Woodrow Wilson tried to surrender the sovereignty of the United States to the European globalists through the League of Nations, have been trying to deconstruct the Constitution of the United States in order to abrogate the inherent rights of the American people�and the ability of the people to control the elected elite. Try as they have with both the League of Nations and the United Nations, the globalists have failed to abrogate sovereignty to the supra-government of the UN, its central bank�the World Bank�and the International Criminal Court, the enforcement arm of the World Court in the Hague. Yet, by placing unqualified surrogates of globalism on the high court, the transnational industrialists and bankers who finance the political campaigns of tenured Congressman and Senator to gain their votes on these "important" bedrock issues, have been able to nibble away at the edges of the Constitution for decades until it no longer resembles the document for which thousands of Americans shed their blood to protect.

The advise and consent provision in Article II, Section 2�inserted to make sure that cronyism was never a criteria for federal appointments�has devolved into ideological war games since the senatorial privilege of "advise and consent" is now used to deny presidents the confirmations of strict rule-of-law jurists to the federal bench because socialism�even in a democracy�calls for "rule by and for the minority," not "rule by the majority." Social justice argues that while all men are created equal, some are a little more equal than others.

Socialism began to creep into the high court with the appointment of Felix Frankfurter�one of the founding attorneys of the American Civil Liberties Union. The first communist appointed to the high court was Abe Fortas. His appointment was a "crony" appointment by Lyndon B. Johnson.

Had Fortas been properly vetted, he would never have been nominated for a slot on the high court. Fortas was a close, personal friend and political ally of LBJ. Their friendship dated back to the mid-1940s when Fortas was, first, an Undersecretary of the Department of the Interior and later, General Counsel to the FEA in the Roosevelt Administration. (Fortas was outed by Gestapo chieftain Henrich Muller at the end of World War II when Muller began providing the American government with top secret Nazi information on Soviet moles in the Roosevelt Administration. Fortas was on a list of 87 names that included other notable FDR aides such as Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, Adolph Berle, Jr.. Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss, as agents of the Soviet Union. Muller could not identify which were paid agents and which were merely ideological soulmates. But all of them had provided a steady stream of data to the Soviets during the war.

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Hitler's Gestapo had successfully tapped most of the private phones of the world's leaders. In 1939, German scientist Dr. Wilhelm Obnesorge cracked the code of the AT&T A-3 scrambler, and the Gestapo was able to monitor the "secure" telephone calls made from any telephone on Capitol Hill in Washington or from 10 Downing Street in London as well as most of the homes of the other world leaders if Berlin viewed them as a threat to the Third Reich.) Unfortunately for the American people, the Truman Administration didn't care. While Truman didn't want the pro-Soviet FDR aides in his administration, he was not eager to expose them, either since, with Roosevelt dead, they were his problem and the buck did stop at his desk.

Click Here for Part Two -----> 2

Did what Robert Kennedy uncovered about Lyndon B. Johnson bring about the assassination of John F. Kennedy? What strange coincident happened on Nov. 22, 1963? Why didn't what America learn from the cronyism of FDR's and LBJ's judicial appointments? How did we get a card-carrying communist on the Supreme Court? Are we about to let a globalist join the High Court? CLICK HERE for the answers.

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