Streetside demonstrators declare that the unborn deserve legal protection, and that their murder should be absolutely abolished. (Photo Flickr Missionaries to the Preborn)
The following analysis explores the biblical requirement for men and women in civil authority to resist lawlessness and crime among their superiors in government. They do so by interposing themselves and their offices on the side of justice and truth to protect those citizens they serve — and to obey and fear God.
Postmodern thinking may mark our era, one in which absolute truth is denied, and everyone’s opinion about what is right is deemed equal in standing to any other. But God reigns today, according the holy writ, and His claims for obedience by magistrates do not evaporate just because Republicans and Democrats control state houses and county commissions in Tennessee or Wisconsin. In this text, Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, is reminded how the doctrine of interposition works. He is told it is pleasing to God if the innocent (the unborn) have rise to their defense high officials to protect them from destruction. The program worked once before in Wisconsin, in favor of escaped black slaves.
The duty of lawful interposition is little regarded. In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Haslam rejects this ‘doctrine of the lesser magistrate,” and so does Hamilton County clerk Bill Knowles, who capitulated to Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 federal deconstruction of the meaning of marriage and its imposition of judicial fiat against Tennessee constitutional provisions protecting marriage and the Tennessee code annotated codifying the marital order of one man, one woman so united. — DJT
By Rev. Matt Trewhella / Missionaries to the Preborn
We are writing to demand interposition for the preborn here in the state of Wisconsin. The Supreme Court has contradicted the law of God. Roe v. Wade gives license to murder. Your duty, therefore, is to oppose the Supreme Court. As a magistrate you possess lawful authority. Magistrates are to uphold the law of God. When God’s law is impugned by another authority, like the Supreme Court, your duty is not to bow down to them, but to resist them.
This has been understood throughout Western Civilization. William Blackstone, the most cited legal scholar by America’s founders, referred to God’s law as “those superior laws,” and stated that “upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation [God’s written law], depend all human laws; that is to say, no human laws should be suffered to contradict these.” Roe v. Wade does “contradict” the law of God.
Western Civilization is built upon the premise that when “higher law” is impugned by civil authorities, other civil authorities have the right and duty not to obey. The standard has long been – divine law trumps human laws.
God’s law vs. man’s opinion
The idea that lawless federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, must be obeyed, even when they write opinions that inscribe immorality and injustice, is a fiction. Your duty is to uphold the laws and statutes of Wisconsin, not uphold an immoral, unjust, constitutionally-repugnant Supreme Court opinion.
When the Supreme Court acts outside the parameters of the constitution it is incumbent on state magistrates to maintain allegiance to the U.S. constitution and not blithely obey federal lawlessness. Nowhere are states compelled to a suicide pact with a lawless federal government.
Governor Walker, you cannot hide behind the lie that “the Supreme Court has ruled, so all I can do is obey.” Many in America proffer the idea that the constitution declares the judiciary to be the final arbiter of what is constitutional or unconstitutional. They proffer Article 6, paragraph 2 of the U.S. constitution, the supremacy clause, for their notion of judicial supremacy. But when you read Article 6, paragraph 2, you realize that the Supreme Court isn’t even mentioned, nor are federal courts of any kind mentioned.
Article 6, paragraph 2, known as the supremacy clause, actually gives supremacy to the constitution! Wholly opposite of this view of ‘judicial supremacy’ was the view held by America’s founders. They viewed the judiciary as being the weakest branch of the government.
Thomas Jefferson
In a letter penned in 1823, Thomas Jefferson stated: “At the establishment of our constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous.” Alexander Hamilton, who was the most favorable to the judiciary, wanting to allay the fears that other of the founders had of the judiciary, stated: “The judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the constitution; because it will be least in the capacity to annoy or injure them.”
James Madison, known as the architect of the constitution, stated: “The Judiciary is beyond comparison the weakest of the three departments of power.” He said, “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates.”
The legislature does not bow down to the judiciary, rather it predominates. The judiciary is not the strongest; it does not write laws; it is not the final arbiter. Rather, as the founders stated, they are supposed to be the most helpless, the most harmless, the weakest, and the least dangerous to the constitution. All that has been turned on its head.
Are judges ultimately in charge?
Now, all other branches bow down to the judiciary, as though they can only obey. America has replaced a monarchy with an oligarchy. We now have social transformation without representation. Jefferson warned of this 200 years ago. He wrote in a letter in 1820 to an early judicial supremacist: “You seem . . . to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
He went on to write: “The constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots.” And that is what the Supreme Court is in our day, despots. And they are not the final arbiters, as Jefferson states, “The constitution has erected no such single tribunal.” Jefferson stated in another letter in 1821, a year later: “The germ of dissolution of our federal government is in the constitution of the federal Judiciary; an irresponsible body (for impeachment is scarcely a scare-crow) working like gravity by night and by day, gaining a little today and a little tomorrow, and advancing its noiseless step like a thief, over the field of jurisdiction, until all shall be usurped.”
Expansive courts
The judiciary has been doing exactly this for 200 years now, rewriting the Constitution, giving themselves powers never granted them in the Constitution, and usurping all other government jurisdictions. Men will forbear, and so we should, but there comes a point where forbearance becomes sin.
There comes a point where forbearance becomes cowardice. There comes a point when men realize they no longer have the convenience of acting indifferent towards the unjust and immoral actions of their government. And I submit to you that the lawlessness of the judiciary should not be forborne.
WE submit to you that the murder of the preborn should not be forborne. Senator Oliver Ellsworth, the primary drafter of Article 3 of the constitution which delineates the function of the judiciary, promised the people of his state before the constitution was ratified that the judiciary was “not to intermeddle with your internal policy.” Now, every governor in America bows down and bends over to the judiciary.
They accommodate murder, they accommodate perversion of marriage, they will accommodate boys in the girl’s shower rooms, too. Alexander Hamilton, the founding father with the biggest love affair with the judiciary, while trying to calm concerns of other founders, stated that the judiciary “must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.”
In other words, Hamilton expected the executive branch to check the judiciary if they made immoral/unjust or constitutionally repugnant rulings. But now, the judiciary not only has the compliance of the President (not to mention Congress), but also has the compliance of the executive branch when it comes to the governor of every state in America.
None interpose. Their duty is not to accommodate or bow down, but to interpose.
Unchecked powers to be resisted
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker
The judiciary is the tyrant. They are lawless. We are under the despotism of an oligarchy. And this lawless authoritarianism of the federal courts must be broken, it will only be broken by the interposition of the lesser magistrates. Your interposition for the preborn is needed and necessary, Governor Walker.
As legal historian Alpheus Thomas Mason wrote not too long ago: “Implicit in the system of government the Framers designed is the basic premise that unchecked power in any hands whatsoever is intolerable.”
The Supreme Court must be checked, and it must be checked by the state magistrates. Congress is not going to do it; Congress is a weakling. As the chief executive of this state Governor Walker, you need to do your God-given duty and check the lawlessness of the judiciary. Your duty in regard to the murder of the preborn is clear. Interposition is needed and necessary. State magistrates are not to just unquestioningly do the bidding of the federal authority. State governments, for example, were never intended to be mere conduits or implementation centers for immoral and unjust federal law or court opinion as they have become today.
Atrophy among ‘intermediary’ powers
Herbert Schlossberg speaks to this point in his magnum opus, Idols for Destruction. He says regarding the state magistrates: “The framers of the American Constitution were conscious of the excesses to which centralized political systems were prone, and their solution was to devise multiple levels of authority. The existence of states, cities, counties, townships, and independent taxing authorities, which, to apologists for the state, has been a messy derogation from beneficent centralized power, has saved us from some of the assaults on freedom that others have suffered.”
Schlossberg points out, however, that in our day these “intermediate institutions, which formerly served to check the central power, have largely atrophied.” He later concludes: “After three-quarters of a century, the new nationalism has borne bitter fruit. People who have despised the right of localities to govern themselves have delivered them into the hands of federal masters.
Local politicians have acquiesced in the mugging of the provinces because in return for giving up political authority they have received monetary benefits.” State magistrates in America today need to be reminded that a magistrate who upholds or follows an unjust or immoral court opinion, like Roe v. Wade, becomes complicit in the higher authorities’ rebellion against God. John of Salisbury rightly declared in Policraticus: “Loyal shoulders should sustain the power of the ruler so long as it is exercised in subjection to God and follows His ordinances; but if it resists and opposes the divine commandments, and wishes to make me share in its war against God, then with unrestrained voice, I answer back that God must be preferred before any man on earth.”
‘Duty bound to interpose’
Gov. Walker, you have a duty to interpose against this federal attack upon the preborn, not accommodate it. We also note that, just 11 years after the ink dried on the U.S. Constitution, the federal government acted outside its Constitutional restraints and two states, Virginia and Kentucky, demonstrated interposition against the federal Alien and Sedition Acts and issued resolutions of defiance.
James Madison
James Madison, who is known as the architect of the U.S. Constitution, authored Virginia’s Resolution. He wrote in part “… the states who are parties thereto [parties to the U.S. Constitution], have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose against the evil, and for maintaining within the respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties.”
Thomas Jefferson wrote the Kentucky Resolution and stated in part, “…and that whensoever the general government [federal government] assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”
Wisconsin’s defiance: ‘Without authority, void, of no force’
Finally, in the 1850’s, Wisconsin’s Legislature and Supreme Court demonstrated interposition in the Joshua Glover/Sherman Booth incident by defying the federal government regarding slavery.
This included defying the U.S. Supreme Court. The legislature stated in part, “Resolved: That this assumption of jurisdiction by the federal judiciary, in the said case, and without process, is an act of undelegated power, and therefore without authority, void, and of no force.” They declared the federal Fugitive Slave Act to be “without authority, void, and of no force” in Wisconsin.
They defied and interposed against the injustice, rather than accommodate it. The Wisconsin Legislature went on to declare, “Resolved, that the government formed by the constitution of the United States was not the exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself; but that, as in all other cases of compact among parties having no common judge, each party has an equal right to judge for itself, as well of infractions as of the mode and measure of redress.” Gov. Walker, the history of Western Civilization, the history of the founding of our nation, and the history of our own state repudiate the idea that you must obey an immoral, unjust, constitutionally repugnant court opinion issued by the Supreme Court.
You cannot hide behind the common lie of governors — “The Supreme Court has ruled – all I can do is obey.” Your duty is interposition. Be assured, if you do your duty, that we will support you both publicly and privately, with our substance, with our lives, with our prayers. Gov. Walker, we demand that you protect the preborn in Wisconsin, and we will accept nothing less. May Christ be glorified in the earth.
