John Stormer is an amazing author. He has sold over 11 million books. One, None Dare Call It Treason, sold 7 million. That was in 1964 when there was no internet, no faxes, no talk shows for conservatives. Stormer may have been the first to put a coupon in the back of the book for additional orders.

So, a new book by John Stormer means we can assume that he has something else to say. Indeed he does.

In Betrayed by the Bench, Stormer traces the lawlessness of so many of today’s rulings to the revolt against the common law that is Christian through and through. The revolt was led from the Harvard Law School by professors such as its Dean, Roscoe Pound. The replacement was the tyranny of case law.

The case law preferred by Pound and his followers allowed them to slip out from under the constraints of the timeless and universal precepts foundational to the Common Law. Case law allows judges to “make law.” One of Pound’s followers, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes, made this amazing statement: “We are under a constitution, but the constitution is what we say it is.”

Equally as amazing as Hughes’ assertion was the failure to impeach him for violating his oath of office. But as Stormer points out, the idea of absolutes binding men died in the pulpits before it died in the civil realm.

Stormer calls the result of judicial lawmaking “an on-going Constitutional Convention.” I would call it a coup d’etat. This coup has been hard to spot because the judges did not have a bunch of colonels circling the seat of government with tanks. We have witnessed a coup by increments — something that is much harder to detect.

There has been a concerted effort to exclude the Declaration of Independence from the corpus of binding law. This is a legal impossibility in view of the nature of the Declaration — it is a contract much the same as Articles of Incorporation are. No one is at liberty to unilaterally change the terms of a contract.

Our sixth president, John Quincy Adams, had this to say about the foundational role of the Declaration for the Constitution and laws made pursuant to it:

The boldness of the Court’s usurpation is somewhat like the old line of the crook who is caught in the act exclaiming, “Who do you believe, me or your lying eyes?” To give but one example, consider the 14th Amendment. The 39th Congress expressly stipulated that the Amendment was not designed to control schools, voting and elections. Indeed, that was so well understood that the 15th Amendment was enacted in order to deal with voting.

The record of the clear intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment has not stopped the Supreme Court from inventing the doctrine of incorporation out of thin air. This has allowed the Supremes to increase consolidation of power in their own hands (and in the hands of their willing accomplices in the legislative and the executive branches) in Washington. This has been done at the expense of the Constitutional reservation of most governmental powers to the states and to the people.

Incorporation might be best understood by thinking of it as incorporating stolen powers. The lack of jurisdiction for many of the Court’s decisions is comparable to the city of Paris levying a tax to be paid by citizens of the United States in the U.S.

Incorporation is now being expanded by a majority (six of the nine justices) of the Supremes to allow for foreign law as a guide to their judicial lawmaking. When the Court recently overturned capital punishment for an 18-year old who had cold-bloodedly murdered a neighbor when he was just a “child” of 17, Justice Breyer claimed the support of the murder law in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe! The country run by a thug who has proclaimed himself a black Hitler!

Gun owners should not be surprised when the gun control laws of some other thugocracy such as Cuba form the basis of a Supreme rape of the 2nd Amendment. Americans generally should not be surprised at any unconstitutional notion the Supremes may take into their heads.

One challenge we face in freeing ourselves from this judicial tyranny is that they have the benefit of a mind fake that has us believing that anything, no matter how outrageous, that comes out of the mouth of a judge is law. Hence we see other government officials — who have all taken the same oath of office to uphold the Constitution — violating their oaths by obeying unconstitutional edicts of the Supreme Court. This is otherwise known as “upholding the rule of law.” Of course, it is anything but.

Until “We the People” remember that we only gave the crowd in Washington a very limited amount of power to do only a very few things, we will continue to be ruled by unelected and unaccountable politicians wrapped in black robes.

(My Live Fire interview with John Stormer can be heard at http://www.gunowners.org/radio.htm. Stormer’s Betrayed by the Bench can be ordered from Liberty Bell Press at http://www.libertybellpress.com.)