Justice Served

Liberals across the nation have reacted in shock to Iowa voters’ decision to dismiss three state supreme court justices over their participation in a decision granting marriage rights to homosexual couples.

Their dismay is understandable. Iowa gave them Barak Obama. Launched by the Iowa Democratic Party caucuses, he became the most liberal president ever elected. How could these same Iowans hold such outmoded views regarding marriage and judges?

Their arguments uniformly decry this month’s vote based on the need for an independent judiciary unaffected by the whims of political or moral circumstance. After all, they say, the federal and state constitutions were written, in part, to protect the rights of the minority from the excesses of the majority. And in this point, they are correct.

But in this case Iowans voted to protect the majority from the excesses of the minority.

Prior to the court’s ruling, civil marriage had always been a privilege granted by the state to couples who qualify. The state reserves the right to deny marriage to minors and to others for whom marriage is deemed inappropriate. While restrictions were few, marriage has never been a legal right.

By reversing Iowa’s law limiting marriage to heterosexual partners, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that marriage is now a right and no longer a privilege. In stating that bans on homosexual marriage restrict some people’s pursuit of happiness, and therefore discriminates, the justices opened a broad door that will be difficult to close.

This is a perilous road. At some point marriage will become meaningless to society. In fact, we are closer to that day than one might imagine.

What would put a stop to this craziness? Here is one idea that is sure to get someone’s attention.

John is 85 years old and owns farm land worth $6 million. When John dies his son Robert will inherit his estate. But under current law Robert will owe a mountain of inheritance taxes which will necessitate selling some of the land. To avoid this problem John and Robert decide to be united in marriage. John keeps his holdings in one piece., Robert inherits the estate as a surviving spouse and the government misses out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in inheritance taxes.

That’s one loophole that is bound to be sewn shut.

Back to the issue at hand.

The rejection of the concepts of right and wrong in favor of situational ethics by current society leads us down a road of continuous uncertainty and grasping for purpose.

Thus a body of judges has overturned millennia of wise tradition in order to accommodate the views of a vocal political minority.

I have come to believe that many judges lose all sense of history and wisdom for the future when they take the bench. If this were not so, such grotesque and myopic rulings would never occur.

It is important to understand that Iowans do not elect judges. Justices from the state supreme court on down are proposed by an “independent” nominating commission selected by the governor upon recommendation from – you guessed it – the legal establishment. So the state’s lawyers, an overwhelmingly liberal bunch, get the first crack at naming justices. This is followed by a narrowing of candidates by a politically appointed nominating commission. The nominating commission has been dominated by liberal Democrats for decades.

This is why it is disingenuous to decry the justices’ dismissal by noting that at least one of them was nominated by a Republican governor.

Unlike presidential nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court, Iowa's governor has little latitude in judicial nominations. It is impossible for an elected politician to stack the courts. But the judicial nominating commission can thoroughly do so.

Iowa voters have the right to remove judges by majority vote – period! While it was presumed by the legal establishment that removal would occur only as a result of malfeasance or outright criminality, there is no such requirement in Iowa law.

A justice can be removed simply for being ugly if that is the will of the voters.

This presents an interesting conundrum for judges and the judicial gene pool – lawyers and their activist organizations.

Their first inclination certainly must be to challenge the Iowa law allowing voters the right to retain or remove judges. But such legal maneuvering would be seen for what it would be – an attempt to remove Iowans’ ability to effect change when the judicial system has run amok.

The more palatable move will be an attempt to rewrite the code to more closely limit the circumstances under which a justice may be removed. But given the outcome of the recent vote, this too would be a difficult step.

My advice to the lawyers and judges of Iowa is simple. You have worked for decades to remove black and white from the law and replace them with varying shades of gray. You strive to make nothing actually wrong and nothing completely right.

You wrote the rules and you lost anyway.

Live with it!