2 PARAGRAPHS 4 LIBERTY: #245 "INDEPENDENCE OF THE JUDICIARY"

     My great friend Judge Andy Guilford recently called my attention to an insight that I will pass along to you: the Judiciary is probably the most important of our three branches of government.  Why?  Because the Executive is dependent upon the majority to stay in office, and so is the Legislature.  So it is only the Judiciary that truly upholds and enforces minority rights.  And that is what makes America what it is.  In other words, the very soul of our great country is our freedoms and our liberties.  And that soul is continually under attack, if only in the name of “keeping us safe.”  Wiretapping, surveillance cameras, unnecessary pre-trial confinement, license plate and facial recognition cameras, reduced rights under our search and seizure laws cloaked under the guise of the so-called War on Drugs, and on and on.  And it is really only the Judicial Branch of Government that stands in the way of even more erosion of our precious liberties.  I have said it many times in these columns, and it bears repeating: the Delegates at our Constitutional Convention in 1787 fought, debated and bickered over numbers of things, but literally each delegate agreed that the most important function of government is to protect our Liberties from the encroachment of government.  (The second most important was our security.)

      So what can we do to protect our Judicial Branch of Government?  Primarily we must protect its independence!  In the past few years we as a society have allowed our judiciary to become more politicized, even to the extent that several states have allowed judicial candidates to be endorsed by political parties.  In addition, many judicial branches, including California, have been intentionally underfunded by the legislatures in response to judicial decisions that the legislatures did not agree with.  These are dangerous precedents, because all of us are in the minority in some regards and, “There but for the Grace of God,” each of us could in fact be overly or even wrongly prosecuted by the government for just about anything.  We simply must have an independent judicial system to protect us from all of these potential abuses.  So everyone please be aware of this continuing threat, and lend a hand to protect us all against it.  We simply must keep our Judicial branch of government independent!

Story for the week: A Doctor gave a man six months to live.  But the man couldn’t pay his bills, so the Doctor gave him another six months.

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