Here To Stay, June 29, 2012

Published on June 29, 2012

Although very few people read these articles and fewer yet seem willing to accept what is for them the hard truths that I write about the inevitable degeneration of a nation founded on false principles, let me state an additional hard truth that even fewer readers will be able to accept or understand as they become agitated into "doing something" to reverse the decision rendered yesterday of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. andDepartment of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. That decision is here to day. The so-called Protection Protection and Affordable Care Act, herein after referred to quite properly as ObamaCare is here to stay. It is not going away.

No, ObamaCare is not going to go away even in the unlikely event that former Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Willard Mitt Romney, upon whose "RomneyCare" it is based, is elected President of the United States of America on Tuesday, November 6, 2012. Even if the election results in this unlikely outcome, you see, and the hapless members of the organized crime family of the naturalist "right" in the Republican Party maintain control of the United States House of Representatives and take majority control the United States Senate, they will not have the sixty votes in the Senate necessary to block any filibuster that the opposite number in the organized crime family of the naturalist "left" will wage to the very death in order to prevent ObamaCare's legislative repeal. Mind you, that's the supposedly "best case" outcome that many clueless adherents of "conservatism" and "constitutionalism" can expect. There will simply not be a "filibuster proof" majority in the United States Senate to repeal ObamaCare in its entirety. It is here to stay in one form or another.

Moreover, there are two other scenarios, one "worse" and the other "worst."

"Worse case" scenario: The lawless, reckless statist who was known for a long time as Barry Soetoro, Jr., but has been known for the past thirty years or so as "Barack Hussein Obama" is, as I expect and predict will be the case, re-elected on November 6, 2012. Even if Republicans wound up controlling both Houses of the United States Congress, which is possible, one is still back to the reality that any attempt to repeal even a single provision of ObamaCare, including the "individual mandate" that was declared constitutional as a result of Chief Justice John Roberts simply rewriting the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act's specific reference to a "penalty" upon taxpayers for not purchasing health insurance as a "tax" even though Congress specifically rejected referring to it as "tax," will be vetoed by a re-elected Obama. There will not be 290 votes in the House of Representatives or sixty-seven in the Senate to override such a veto.

"Worst case" scenario: Obama is re-elected and the Democrats regain control of the House of Representatives as well maintaining their control of the Senate.

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, we live in a country full of boiled frogs, that is, citizens who have limited spans-of-attention and are easily distracted by the panoply of bread and circuses that our caesars use to keep the masses busy as they increasing their hold over us and the just exercise of legitimate liberties. Most people "get used" to their "government goodies." They got "used" to Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. They got "used" to the increase of the size and scope and the power of the Federal government during World War I and the New Deal and World II and the Cold War and the Great Society/War on Poverty. They expected Republican administrations under Dwight David Eisenhower and Richard Milhous Nixon and Leslie Lynch King, Jr./Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. and Ronald Wilson Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush to keep the various unconstitutional programs that have been created and maintained by the confiscatory taxing power of the Federal government.

Dwight Eisenhower merely amalgamated the various agencies that had been floating around in inter-galactic space for the twenty years prior to his taking office on January 1, 1953, that had been created under the New Deal of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He asked Congress to merge many of these agencies into what was called the United States Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which became the United States Department of Health and Human Services in 1979 when the thoroughly unconstitutional United States Department of Education was created at the recommendation of President James Earl Carter, Jr. Ronald Wilson Reagan campaigned against Carter in 1980 on a platform of eliminating the Department of Education and the Department of Energy, which had been created at the initiative of the peanut man/appeaser of Communists worldwide from George on August 4, 1977. He did neither.

Indeed, the Republican Party platform of 1980 included abolition of the Department of Education:

We understand and sympathize with the plight of America's public school teachers, who so frequently find their time and attention diverted from their teaching responsibilities to the task of complying with federal reporting requirements. America has a great stake in maintaining standards of high quality in public education. The Republican Party recognizes that the achievement of those standards is possible only to the extent that teachers are allowed the time and freedom to teach. To that end, the Republican Party supports deregulation by the federal government of public education, and encourages the elimination of the federal Department of Education.

We further sympathize with the right of qualified teachers to be employed by any school district wishing to hire them, without the necessity of their becoming enrolled with any bargaining agency or group. We oppose any federal action, including any action on the part of the Department of Education, to establish "agency shops" in public schools. (Republican Party Platform of 1980.)

Just talk. All talk.

It is never any more than. It is never any more than insane babbling because the naturalists of the "right" do not want to offend "swing" or "moderate" or "independent" voters in "swing" states, those that actually decide presidential elections (see Step By Step Yet Again), who have gotten used to their "goodies."

It is actually worse than all of this if you recall that the "'compassionate,' 'pro-life' 'conservative'", President George Walker Bush, gave us the "Patriot Act" and "No Child Left Behind" and the over-the-counter sale of the "Plan B Emergency" baby-killing potion and the first "economic stimulus" under the Orwellian name of "Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) on October 3, 2008. He did not even make an effort to reverse the decision of the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, to permit the marketing of RU-486, the so-called "abortion pill," saying, quite infamously, in a debate with then Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., on October 3, 2000, that he would have no power to do as the FDA had determined that the baby-killing potion was "safe for women." Ah, but men continue to dream the dream of "settling" injustices without the true Faith as they trust in one "secular savior" after another despite all of the empirical evidence that demonstrates these men to be nothing other than craven careerists concerned only about "winning" (see Nothing Can Ever Be "Settled" Without The True Faith).

"Things" will be no different with ObamaCare. It is here to stay. People will grow more "comfortable" with it with the passage of time. Whatever opposition to it that exists at this time will fade. We are well on the path to a form of socialized medicine that comes complete with "panels" will ration health care as they see fit as the costs associated with this monstrous, unconstitutional exercise of statism that is in full violation of the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity continue to rise, placing pressure to restrict certain types of care to those for whom it can provide the most "utility" (in other words, what is the cost of the proposed care as opposed to the expected life span and "productivity" of the "consumer"). More than ever before, the Brave New World is upon us in its starkest form yet.

As readers of this site know and will be reminded once again in the concluding section of this commentary, this brave new world did not just "happen." No, it is but the logical result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King that was wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized by the organized forces of the naturalism of Judeo-Masonry, which is dissected so well by Mr. Hugh Akins in his new book on the subject. This is all a chastisement. Every single bit of it. And there is no "quick fix" to it as it was centuries in the making.

An Unsurprising Decision?

Although I had thought that the "swing" vote in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. yesterday would be the Supreme Court's senior Associate Justice, Anthony Kennedy, an appointee of President Ronald Wilson Reagan who had voted in the plurality in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, June 29, 1992 (that's right, twenty years ago today), to uphold the essence of the Court's decision in the case of Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973, while also upholding key provisions g a Pennsylvania law requiring "informed consent" and "parental notification" as not to place a "restriction" or "undue burden" on "access" to surgical baby-killing, the actual "swing" vote was that of Chief Justice John Roberts, an appointee of President George Walker Bush.

Roberts essentially rewrote ObamaCare to make it constitutional, doing so in the name of "due deference" to the "will" of the legislative branch while finding that the "individual mandate" is a valid exercise of Congressional taxing power and not as, United States Solicitor General Donald Verrilli claimed in oral argumentation on Monday, March 26, 2012. an exercise of the commerce power as found in Subsection Eight of Section 8 of Article I of the United States Constitution, even though, as noted before, Congress itself referred to the fine imposed upon those of us who do not have an will not purchase health insurance as being a "penalty" and not a tax. Concurring justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan agreed with the outcome but said that they did find justification for the "individual mandate" in in the commerce clause.

This is what Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy, joined by Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, wrote by way of a concluding evisceration of the totality of Roberts's sixty-five page Court opinion (see Text of Full Opinion):

The Court today decides to save a statute Congress did not write. It rules that what the statute declares to be a requirement with a penalty is instead an option subject to a tax. And it changes the intentionally coercive sanction of a total cut-off of Medicaid funds to a supposedly noncoercive cut-off of only the incremental funds that the Act makes available.

The Court regards its strained statutory interpretationas judicial modesty. It is not. It amounts instead to a vast judicial overreaching. It creates a debilitated, inoperable version of health-care regulation that Congress did not enact and the public does not expect. It makes enactment of sensible health-care regulation more difficult, since Congress cannot start afresh but must take as its point of departure a jumble of now senseless provisions, provisions that certain interests favored under the Court’s new design will struggle to retain. And it leaves the public and the States to expend vast sums of money on requirements that may or may not survive the necessary congressional revision.

The Court’s disposition, invented and atextual as it is,does not even have the merit of avoiding constitutional difficulties. It creates them. The holding that the Individual Mandate is a tax raises a difficult constitutional question (what is a direct tax?) that the Court resolves with inadequate deliberation. And the judgment on the Medicaid Expansion issue ushers in new federalism concerns and places an unaccustomed strain upon the Union. Those States that decline the Medicaid Expansion must subsidize, by the federal tax dollars taken from their citizens, vast grants to the States that accept the Medicaid Expansion. If that destabilizing political dynamic, so antagonistic to a harmonious Union, is to be introduced at all, it should be by Congress, not by the Judiciary.

The values that should have determined our course today are caution, minimalism, and the understanding that the Federal Government is one of limited powers. But the Court’s ruling undermines those values at every turn. In the name of restraint, it overreaches. In the name of constitutional avoidance, it creates new constitutional questions. In the name of cooperative federalism, it undermines state sovereignty.

The Constitution, though it dates from the founding oft he Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court tote a ch otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.

For the reasons here stated, we would find the Act invalid in its entirety. We respectfully dissent. (Minority Opinion, at pages 64-65 of opinion, page 190-191 of the full .pdf.)

Even though dissenting justices "got it right" insofar as constitutional interpretation is concerned, they do not realize that a written document that admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words, which are as easily susceptible to deconstructionism (that is, being emptied of their true meaning and filled with false meanings to suit various perceived utilitarian"needs) in the hands of judicial positivists (those who believe the law is what they say it is regardless of moral truth and/or the plain meaning of words) as Sacred Scripture is in the hands of Protestants of any variety and of Modernist Catholics, many of whom, such as Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI, make advertence to philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned propositions claiming that dogmatic pronouncements are conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they were formulated. Nothing based upon these slender threads can hold up over the weight of time. Fabric sewn together with slender threads must come apart and disintegrate into bits of useless rags.

I have made this point repeatedly on this site. Repeatedly. I have made it in a sustained manner in Conversion in Reverse: How the Ethos of Americanism Converted Catholics. Principles of right, limited governance can be maintained only when supported by the truths of the Holy Faith. Absent that, of course, documents such as the Constitution of the United States of America are utterly defenseless against their own deconstruction and thus degeneration into meaninglessness over time. Yesterday's decision is not unsurprising. Anything is possible in a world that is founded on false anti-Incarnational principles. Do not be surprised if the Supreme Court of the United States of America decides ultimately to uphold "gay marriage" as a matter of "states' rights" and/or "personal privacy."

National security?

Protecting the borders?

The same man who wrote the principal dissenting opinion in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. yesterday, Anthony Kennedy, wrote the opinion of the Court in the case of Arizona, et al. v. United States on Monday, June 26, 2012, that upheld one key provision of the Arizona immigration law while declaring other parts as being a usurpation of the authority of the Federal government. Kennedy was joined with three of consistently "liberal" justices (Sonya Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg) by none other than Chief Justice John Roberts.

It is no wonder, therefore, that Associate Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a scathing dissent of Kennedy's opinion. Here is a brief excerpt:

As is often the case, discussion of the dry legalities that are the proper object of our attention suppresses the very human realities that gave rise to the suit. Arizona bears the brunt of the country’s illegal immigration problem. Its citizens feel themselves under siege by large numbers of illegal immigrants who invade their property, strain their social services, and even place their lives in jeopardy. Federal officials have been unable to remedy the problem, and indeed have recently shown that they are unwilling to do so. Thousands of Arizona’s estimated 400,000 illegal immigrants—including not just children but men and women under 30—are now assured immunity from enforcement, and will be able to compete openly with Arizona citizens for employment.

Arizona has moved to protect its sovereignty—not in contradiction of federal law, but in complete compliance with it. The laws under challenge here do not extend or revise federal immigration restrictions, but merely enforce those restrictions more effectively. If securing its territory in this fashion is not within the power of Arizona, we should cease referring to it as a sovereign State. I dissent. (Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, Dissenting Opinion, at page 22 of opinion. page 51 of the document.)

It is rare for a justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America to take extra-judicial notice of events that are not brought forth in the briefs submitted to the Court and during oral arguments. That Scalia did so was an indication of his frustration about the decision in the Arizona case as well as the then forthcoming decision in the ObamaCare case that was announced yesterday.

Alas, Scalia is himself a legal positivist who does not believe that the Natural Law has any application in American judicial decision-making. That he has found his revered constitution in such disrepair is the direct result of what must happen in nations that do not subordinate themselves in all things that pertain to the good of souls to the authority of the Catholic Church in her exercise, only as a last resort after exhausting all efforts of exhortation and admonition, of the Social Reign of Christ the King.

So Much Hypocrisy and Blindness

Understandably, Caesar Soetoro/Obama is very pleased with the outcome of the decision announced in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business, et al. v. Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, et al. and Department of Health and Human Services, et al. v. Florida, et al. even if its principal holding concerning the constitutionality of the "individual mandate" as a tax rather than a penalty, which is what Congress specified it to be legislatively it to be in 2010 and what Obama himself said it was in 2009:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: ...during the campaign. Under this mandate, the government is forcing people to spend money, fining you if you don't. How is that not a tax?

OBAMA: Well, hold on a second, George. Here - here's what's happening. You and I are both paying $900, on average - our families - in higher premiums because of uncompensated care. Now what I've said is that if you can't afford health insurance, you certainly shouldn't be punished for that.

That's just piling on. If, on the other hand, we're giving tax credits, we've set up an exchange, you are now part of a big pool, we've driven down the costs, we've done everything we can and you actually can afford health insurance, but you've just decided, you know what, I want to take my chances. And then you get hit by a bus and you and I have to pay for the emergency room care, that's ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: That may be, but it's still a tax increase.

OBAMA: No. That's not true, George. The - for us to say that you've got to take a responsibility to get health insurance is absolutely not a tax increase. What it's saying is, is that we're not going to have other people carrying your burdens for you anymore than the fact that right now everybody in America, just about, has to get auto insurance. Nobody considers that a tax increase. People say to themselves, that is a fair way to make sure that if you hit my car, that I'm not covering all the costs.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But it may be fair, it may be good public policy ...

OBAMA: No, but - but, George, you - you can't just make up that language and decide that that's called a tax increase. Any ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Here's the ...

OBAMA: What - what - if I - if I say that right now your premiums are going to be going up by 5 or 8 or 10 percent next year and you say well, that's not a tax increase; but, on the other hand, if I say that I don't want to have to pay for you not carrying coverage even after I give you tax credits that make it affordable, then ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: I - I don't think I'm making it up. Merriam Webster's Dictionary: Tax - "a charge, usually of money, imposed by authority on persons or property for public purposes."

OBAMA: George, the fact that you looked up Merriam's Dictionary, the definition of tax increase, indicates to me that you're stretching a little bit right now. Otherwise, you wouldn't have gone to the dictionary to check on the definition. I mean what ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, no, but ...

OBAMA: ... what you're saying is ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: I wanted to check for myself. But your critics say it is a tax increase.

OBAMA: My critics say everything is a tax increase. My critics say that I'm taking over every sector of the economy. You know that. Look, we can have a legitimate debate about whether or not we're going to have an individual mandate or not, but ...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But you reject that it's a tax increase?

OBAMA: I absolutely reject that notion. (Obama Declaring Mandate 'Absolutely' Not a Tax.)

Behold the "post-modern" man, a creature who can live comfortably with contradiction and paradox just as long as he gets his way. It's the "end result" that matters to such sanctimonious creatures, not the reasoning that gets one to the result.

Alas, the same holds true for many of those who adhere to the false opposite of the naturalist "right," people who keep insisting that the "political process" will "rectify" the current nightmare of a Supreme Court decision without realizing that it is the "political process" itself that got us to this point as a document founded on false premises falls victim to every passing whim and fancy.

We were told in 2000 that it was "necessary" for vote for the "lesser of two evils," then Texas Governor George Walker Bush, in large part because of his ability to "reshape" the Supreme Court of the United States of America. We are being told now that Willard Mitt Romney will "protect" the "correct" interpretation of the constitution by whatever appointments he is able to make to the Court.

This is wrong on two counts other than the inherently unstable nature of American jurisprudence.

First, former Governor Romney's record as Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is pretty much the same as that of Governor Bush twelve years ago. That is, Romney appointed men to the bench who were completely pro-abortion just as Bush had done in Texas. Think things will be "different" if there is a "President" Romney? Uh, what chance do you think there is of Democrats not blocking anyone deemed to be a "conservative" from replacing either Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Stephen Breyer if either or both should leave the Supreme Court on their own volition during a Romney presidency other than by dying? Keep dreaming. Keep dreaming.

Second, it is no refuge to point to the fact that President George Walker Bush nominated Samuel Alito in addition to John Roberts. So what? Bush turned to Alito only after his friend and confidante, the pro-abort Harriet Miers, was forced to withdraw her own nomination to replace Associate Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the pro-abortion appointee of President Ronald Wilson Reagan in 1981, after Roberts, who had been nominated to replace O'Connor, was nominated instead to the position of chief justice that had been created by the death of William Rehnquist on September 3, 2005 (see (The Triumph of Protestantism and Posturing and Preening).

Alas, what did the appointment of John Glover Roberts, Jr., who took his oath of office on September 31, 2005, matter to the innocent preborn born who was murdered in Missouri back about a month later with the blessing of the entire membership of the Supreme Court, including himself, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas (Alito did not take his place on the Court until January 31, 2006)? Judge for yourselves:

The full court vacated an order that Justice Clarence Thomas had issued late Friday that had prevented a Missouri prison inmate from obtaining an abortion, to which a federal district judge had found she had a constitutional right.

The inmate, identified in court papers only as Jane Roe, was pregnant when she was sent to a women's prison in Vandalia, Mo., on a parole violation and had been trying for seven weeks to obtain an abortion. She is now 17 weeks pregnant. She plans to pay for the procedure herself but, as an inmate, needs the prison to arrange transportation to a Planned Parenthood clinic in St. Louis, 80 miles away.

Under a policy it adopted last year, the Missouri Department of Corrections will not transport inmates for abortions that it deems not medically necessary. Last Thursday, after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on the inmate's behalf, Judge H. Dean Whipple of Federal District Court in Kansas City ordered the state to provide access to the abortion. The inmate would otherwise "suffer irreparable harm," he said.

The state then appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, which refused to grant a stay of Judge Whipple's order. The state next turned to Justice Thomas, who has administrative jurisdiction over the Eighth Circuit.

In the appeal, Crawford v. Roe, No. 05A333, Attorney General Jay Nixon acknowledged that a state could not impose an "undue burden" on the right to abortion. But in this case, he said, "it is not the prison that has imposed the burden, but the prisoner's violation of the law that resulted in her incarceration that has imposed the burden." The inmate was jailed for a parole violation.

Justice Thomas gave no reason for granting the stay on Friday night, and the full court, to which he then referred the case, gave no reason for vacating the stay. Neither he nor any other member of the court indicated a dissent from the order the court issued on Monday. (Justices Reject Appeal.)

Each of the midget naturalists who ran for the 2012 Republican nomination gave effusive praise to the "conservative" quartet (Roberts Scalia, Thomas and Alito) even though three of them chose not to intervene the save the life of an innocent preborn baby of an incarcerated woman:

First, consider Romney's campaign website.

From the Courts & The Constitution section the campaign says:

"As president, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. These justices hold dear what the great Chief Justice John Marshall called "the basis on which the whole American fabric has been erected": a written Constitution, with real and determinate meaning." (What Does Mitt Romney Think About Chief Justice John Roberts.)

Look, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon gave us five of the seven votes in the cases of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, January 22, 1973 (William Brennan, Potter Stewart, Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell). Ronald Reagan gave us two of the deciding votes in principal plurality opinion in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey twenty years ago today (Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy) while George Herbert Walker Bush gave us yet another man, David Souter, whose pro-abortion record was made very clear to the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 19, 1990, by Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus Foundation (see Howard Phillips Testimony), something that did not matter at all to the supposedly "pro-life" Republicans in the United States Senate. Souter's concurring opinion in the case of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey twenty years ago today was no surprised. We had be warned. We did not listen.

It will be no different under a "President" Romney even if he gets to appoint someone to the Supreme Court of the United States of America.

Believe what you want. Get all agitated if you want to do so. Yesterday's decision is here to stay. ObamaCare is here to stay. Get used to it.

Nothing Stable, Nothing Secure

Just as nothing is stable and nothing is secure in the philosophically absurd world of conciliarism, so is it the case that nothing is stable and nothing is secure on a court where "finality" depends upon the composition of its membership.

This is so eerily similar to what Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI's repackaging of the "evolution of dogma" under his philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned "hermeneutic of continuity" does to the very nature of the papacy by making each pope's pronouncements and even dogmatic statements made by Holy Mother Church's true councils nothing more than "contingent" reflections of a certain time in history that need to be "adjusted" over time. This is what must happen to the written document of a civil government . In other words, contingent beings unguided by any consideration of First and Last Things must become the prisoners of the arbitrary considerations of whoever happens to hold governmental power at any given point in time as law becomes what civil officials say it is regardless of written texts that are supposed to govern their actions. This is the path to tyranny, which must arise in preparation for the coming of the Antichrist, who will come only after "the people" have become completely docile and submissive in the secular ape of the Catholic Church that is the civil government of Modernity.

Nations need to be founded and governed according to right principles, starting with a due recognition of the Catholic Church as the one and only true religion and a due submission to her exercise of the Social Reign of Christ the King in all that pertains to the good of souls. Nations that are indifferent or hostile to this basic truth, which was reiterated by true pope after true pope in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, must degenerate over the course of time as they become subject to the arbitrary whims of those who serve in the civil government and/or whatever happens to constitute "majority" opinion amongst the populace at any given time. Among others, Pope Pius IX explained this in Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864:

For you well know, venerable brethren, that at this time men are found not a few who, applying to civil society the impious and absurd principle of "naturalism," as they call it, dare to teach that "the best constitution of public society and (also) civil progress altogether require that human society be conducted and governed without regard being had to religion any more than if it did not exist; or, at least, without any distinction being made between the true religion and false ones." And, against the doctrine of Scripture, of the Church, and of the Holy Fathers, they do not hesitate to assert that "that is the best condition of civil society, in which no duty is recognized, as attached to the civil power, of restraining by enacted penalties, offenders against the Catholic religion, except so far as public peace may require." From which totally false idea of social government they do not fear to foster that erroneous opinion, most fatal in its effects on the Catholic Church and the salvation of souls, called by Our Predecessor, Gregory XVI, an "insanity," viz., that "liberty of conscience and worship is each man's personal right, which ought to be legally proclaimed and asserted in every rightly constituted society; and that a right resides in the citizens to an absolute liberty, which should be restrained by no authority whether ecclesiastical or civil, whereby they may be able openly and publicly to manifest and declare any of their ideas whatever, either by word of mouth, by the press, or in any other way." But, while they rashly affirm this, they do not think and consider that they are preaching "liberty of perdition;" and that "if human arguments are always allowed free room for discussion, there will never be wanting men who will dare to resist truth, and to trust in the flowing speech of human wisdom; whereas we know, from the very teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ, how carefully Christian faith and wisdom should avoid this most injurious babbling."

And, since where religion has been removed from civil society, and the doctrine and authority of divine revelation repudiated, the genuine notion itself of justice and human right is darkened and lost, and the place of true justice and legitimate right is supplied by material force, thence it appears why it is that some, utterly neglecting and disregarding the surest principles of sound reason, dare to proclaim that "the people's will, manifested by what is called public opinion or in some other way, constitutes a supreme law, free from all divine and human control; and that in the political order accomplished facts, from the very circumstance that they are accomplished, have the force of right." But who, does not see and clearly perceive that human society, when set loose from the bonds of religion and true justice, can have, in truth, no other end than the purpose of obtaining and amassing wealth, and that (society under such circumstances) follows no other law in its actions, except the unchastened desire of ministering to its own pleasure and interests? (Pope Pius IX, Quanta Cura, December 8, 1864.)

Nations that are not governed by leaders who do not understand First and Last Things thus will be at the mercy of various fleeting currents. There will be times when executives and legislators and judges take actions that are consonant with the common temporal good and are founded in solid jurisprudence and pose, at least minimally, no threat to the sanctification and sanctification of the souls of their fellow citizens (a goal that the Catholic Church teaches us must define the proper and just exercise of the authority possessed by civil rulers). There will also be times when executives and legislators and judges take actions that are manifestly opposed to a true conception of the common temporal good and serve as impediments to the sanctification and salvation of the souls of their fellow citizens. Such is the uncertainty of the modern civil state, founded upon false, naturalistic, semi-Pelagian and religiously indifferentist principles, that even trained scholars in constitutional law, a subject that I taught for a long time during my own academic career, are never quite certain what outcome might result from litigation challenging the constitutionality of a given executive action or legislative enactment.

One of the supreme ironies in all of this is that the lords of conciliarism in the United States of America who oppose the "mandate" imposed upon religious institutions to provide health insurance coverage to their employees for contraception and other "family planning" services is that most of them, with several exceptions, support ObamaCare in principle even though it is a massive violation of the Natural Law principle of subsidiarity and even though it supports the funding of chemical and surgical execution of innocent preborn babies disguised in the form of various "exchanges" that make it clear that such killings will be paid for by the American taxpayer. Who, including Mitt Romney, was talking about that yesterday? Who is talking about it today?

As noted earlier in this commentary, the brave new world that is upon us not the result of any single court decision or legislative enactment. No, the brave new world that is upon us was set into motion when a lecherous drunkard named Martin Luther posted those ninety-five theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517. It's been all downhill ever since.

Once again, repeat after me: Catholicism is the one and only foundation of personal and social order.

We must pray and sacrifice and fast as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary for the restoration of the Church Militant on earth and of Christendom in the world.

The Rosary, the Rosary, the Rosary. Use it well. The enemies of Christ the King within in our souls and in the world-at-large and in the conciliar church will be defeated by Our Lady's Most Holy Rosary and the fulfillment of her Fatima Message.

Saint Peter and Saint Paul shed their blood to make it possible for the Faith to be spread during the height of the power of the Roman Empire. Why are we so unwilling to look at everything through the eyes of the true Faith while believing that there is some "secular" shortcut to social order that can come only by the right ordering of souls in cooperation with the graces won for us on Calvary by the shedding of every single drop of the Most Precious Blood of the Divine Redeemer, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?

Isn't it time to pray a Rosary now?

Our Lady of the Rosary, pray for us!

Vivat Christus Rex! Viva Cristo Rey!

Saint Joseph, pray for us.

Saints Peter and Paul, pray for us.

Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.

Saint John the Evangelist, pray for us.

Saint Michael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Gabriel the Archangel, pray for us.

Saint Raphael the Archangel, pray for us.

Saints Joachim and Anne, pray for us.

Saints Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar, pray for us.

Appendix

From "Living in a Completely Post-Legal World," July 26, 2015

This is especially so in the United States of America as two of the Supreme Court of the United States of America’s six Catholic justices, Chief Justice John Glover Roberts and Associate Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy, a dissenter in the original ObamaCare case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, June 28, 2012, have seen fit to engage in what can be called “outcome-based” jurisprudence of the sort that renders the plain language of the Constitution of the United States of America and of the laws enacted thereunder by Congress “ambiguous” in order to save unconstitutional legislation solely because various constituencies might stand to lose benefits if the justices read the text as written, not as they want it to be.

Writing the opinion of the Court in the case of King v. Burwell, June 25, 2016, Chief Justice John Glover Roberts, an appointee of President George Walker Bush (see Pope Pius XII Slams The National Not-So-Right-Life Committee and George Walker Bush and All Other So-Called "Pro-Life Pols) argued that judges have to view a law “in context” even if it means ignoring its plain language:

Petitioners and the dissent respond that the words “established by the State” would be unnecessary if Congress meant to extend tax credits to both State and Federal Exchanges. Brief for Petitioners 20; post, at 4–5. But “our preference for avoiding surplusage constructions is not absolute.” Lamie v. United States Trustee, 540 U. S. 526, 536 (2004); see also Marx v. General Revenue Corp., 568 U. S. ___, ___ (2013) (slip op., at 13) (“The canon against surplusage is not an absolute rule”). And specifically with respect to this Act, rigorous application of the canon does not seem a particularly useful guide to a fair construction of the statute.

The Affordable Care Act contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting. (To cite just one, the Act creates three separate section 1563s. See 124 Stat. 270, 911, 912.) Several features of the Act’s passage contributed to that unfortunate reality. Congress wrote key parts of the Act behind closed doors, rather than through “the traditional legislative process.” Cannan, A Legislative History of the Affordable Care Act: How Legislative Procedure Shapes Legislative History, 105 L. Lib. J. 131, 163 (2013). And Congress passed much of the Act using a complicated budgetary procedure known as “reconciliation,” which limited opportunities for debate and amendment, and bypassed the Senate’s normal 60-vote filibuster requirement. Id., at 159–167. As a result, the Act does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation. Cf. Frankfurter, come Reflections on the Reading of Statutes, 47 Colum. L. Rev. 527, 545 (1947) (describing a cartoon “in which a senator tells his colleagues ‘I admit this new bill is too complicated to understand. We’ll just have to pass it to find out what it means.’”).

Anyway, we “must do our best, bearing in mind the fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.” Utility Air Regulatory Group, 573 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 15) (internal quotation marks omitted). After reading Section 36B along with other related provisions in the Act, we cannot conclude that the phrase “an Exchange established by the State under [Section 18031]” is unambiguous.

B Given that the text is ambiguous, we must turn to the broader structure of the Act to determine the meaning of Section 36B. “A provision that may seem ambiguous in isolation is often clarified by the remainder of the statutory scheme . . . because only one of the permissible mean-ings produces a substantive effect that is compatible with the rest of the law.” United Sav. Assn. of Tex. v.Timbers of Inwood Forest Associates, Ltd., 484 U. S. 365, 371 (1988). Here, the statutory scheme compels us to reject petitioners’ interpretation because it would destabilize the individual insurance market in any State with a Federal Exchange, and likely create the very “death spirals” that Congress designed the Act to avoid. See New York State Dept. of Social Servs. v. Dublino, 413 U. S. 405, 419–420 (1973) (“We cannot interpret federal statutes to negate their own stated purposes.”). (Chief Justice John Roberts, Opinion of the Court, King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015, pp. 14-15.)

John Glover Roberts was the deciding vote to save the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” in the combined cases of National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, June 28, 2012, by ruling that a penalty is not a tax. He did so as Section 7 of Article I of the Constitution of the United States specifies that all bills to raise revenue must originate in the House of Representatives. Roberts that made what is called in legal terms an “ipse dixit,” that is, a statement that is true because one has been asserted as such without any support or documentation. Another way to describe what Roberts has been doing is legal positivism, the belief that whatever is asserted as legal is legal in fact regardless of the binding precepts of the Divine Positive Law and the Natural Law and even of civil laws themselves judges want to find to the contrary.

Here is an excerpt of what Associate Justice Anthony McLeod Kennedy, a Catholic who was appointed to the Court by President Ronald Wilson Reagan and who has been a firm supporter of baby-killing and perversity (see Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part one, Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part two, Arguing About Who Decides That Which Is Beyond Humans To Decide, part three, and Arguing Who Decides That Which is Beyond Humans To Decide, part four), wrote inNational Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, June 28, 2012:

The Constitution, though it dates from the founding of the Republic, has powerful meaning and vital relevance to our own times. The constitutional protections that this case involves are protections of structure. Structural protections—notably, the restraints imposed by federalism and separation of powers—are less romantic and have less obvious a connection to personal freedom than the provisions of the Bill of Rights or the Civil War Amendments. Hence they tend to be undervalued or even forgotten by our citizens. It should be the responsibility of the Court tote a ch otherwise, to remind our people that the Framers considered structural protections of freedom the most important ones, for which reason they alone were embodied in the original Constitution and not left to later amendment. The fragmentation of power produced by the structure of our Government is central to liberty, and when we destroy it, we place liberty at peril. Today’s decision should have vindicated, should have taught, this truth; instead, our judgment today has disregarded it.

For the reasons here stated, we would find the Act invalid in its entirety. We respectfully dissent. (Minority Opinion, at pages 64-65 of opinion, page 190-191 of the full .pdf.)

Ah, that was then, nearly thirty-seven months ago now. Anthony McLeod Kennedy joined with John Glover Roberts, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to rewrite ObamaCare, which has been rewritten endlessly by President Barack Husein Obama/Barry Soetoro, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, a pro-abortion Catholic who took blood money from George “The Killer” Tiller (see Public Life Is Stained With Crime), and her successor Sylvia Burwell, because he did not want to see those who had obtained health insurance, replete with its provisions in support of the killing of innocent human beings (by chemical and surgical means in the womb, “hospice” and “palliative” care, and by “end of life services” that are nothing other than the direct, intentional killing of innocent human beings whose only “crime” is to be disabled or ill).

Such outcome-based legal reasoning in our post-legal world calls to mind something that I wrote about forty years ago now in my doctoral dissertation, which examined efforts on the part of a citizens’ organization on the North Shore of Long Island the City of Rye, New York, to stop construction of a bridge across Long Island Sound from Bayville, New York, to Rye.

Authorization to construct what would have been called the “Long Island Sound Crossing,” a long-held dream of New York’s late master-builder Robert Moses, was transferred in 1967 from Moses’s last stronghold of power, the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority (TBTA), which was a public corporation authorized to issue bonds, to a new agency, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), which has since undergone several mutations.

Although the political machinations of how Governor Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller’s secretary, the equivalent of a presidential chief of staff, Alton Marshall got Moses to relinquish control of the TBTA is a long and detailed story (I got Marshall, then the head of Rockefeller Center, to admit that a deal had been made, being the first one to confirm the long-circulated rumor to that effect, after I asked him a point-blank question in his offices in February of 1976), the TBTA was subsumed by the MTA, which had been created by the 1967 Omnibus Transportation Act of the State of New York along with four other regional transportation authorities in the state. There was only one itsy-bitsy little problem with that, however: the Constitution of the State of New York required each public authority that had the power to issue bonds on the credit of the State of New York to be created by separate and distinct acts of the New York State Legislature. The MTA and the other four regional transportation authorities had been created by an omnibus act.

A case brought in the Supreme Court for the State of New York, which is, believe it or not, a simple trial court and not what its name applies, resulted in a ruling that the state constitution meant what it said, meaning that the MTA and the other four regional transportation authorities had been created unconstitutionally. The initial ruling also meant that the MTA had no authority to construct the Long Island Sound Crossing as it had not been created properly.

Governor Rockefeller was not pleased with the decision, and that is a mild understatement. Also included in the 1967 Omnibus Transportation Act of the State of New York had included a $1.5 billion bond issue to fund transportation projects throughout the state. The bond issue was approved by the voters on November 8, 1967. The state had issued hundreds of millions of dollars in bonds, each of which would have had to have been repaid if the initial decision was upheld by the New York State Court of Appeals, which is the court of last resort in the State of New York.

According to attorney Edward Costikyan, who worked in the powerhouse law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, Rockefeller had an aide personally telephone each of the seven judges of the New York State Court of Appeals to urge them to overturn the New York State Supreme Court’s decision. This was the equivalent of a president of the United States of America telephoning (or, in today’s terms, texting or e-mailing) each of the nine members of the Supreme Court of the United States of America to lobby them to support his position in a particular case. In other words, it is a violation of the principles of separation of powers.

The Court of Appeals overturned the decision rendered by the New York State Supreme Court by a vote of four to three in April of 1969. The majority could not say that the language of the state constitution was unclear or ambiguous. Prophesying the same argument that was used by John Roberts in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, June 28, 2012, and in King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015, the Court of Appeals ruled that the 1967 Omnibus Transportation Act of the State of New York was constitutional as the five regional transportation authorities created therein constituted separate provisions within the act. In other words, separate and distinct acts did not mean separate and distinct acts if the State of New York would have been forced to repay bonds it had no ability to repay.

We are indeed living in a post-legal world, a world of such absurdity that even those judges who recognize tortured reasoning and denounce it as such never come to realize that a written document that admits of no higher authority than the text of its own words is as susceptible to deconstructionism (that is, being emptied of their true meaning and filled with false meanings to suit various perceived utilitarian"needs) in the hands of judicial positivists (those who believe the law is what they say it is regardless of moral truth and/or the plain meaning of words) as Sacred Scripture is in the hands of Protestants of any variety and of Modernist Catholics, many of whom, such as Karol Joseph Wojtyla/John Paul II, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI and Jorge Mario Bergoglio/Francis have made advertence to philosophically absurd and dogmatically condemned propositions claiming that dogmatic pronouncements are conditioned by the historical circumstances in which they were formulated. Nothing based upon these slender threads can hold up over the weight of time. Fabric sewn together with slender threads must come apart and disintegrate into bits of useless rags.

Although, I have long noted in my academic work and my writing on this site that a Constitution that admits of no higher authority than its own text is as malleable in the hands of legal positivists as Sacred Scripture is in the hands of Protestants and Modernists, we have reached a post-legal state of things now that it can be said constitutional and statutory interpretation in United States of America is based almost exclusively on affectivity, which is exactly what Jorge Mario Bergoglio and his band of spiritual robber barons are doing with their veritable blitzkrieg upon any recognizable vestiges of Catholicism in their false religious sect. Some of Jorge’s “bishops” have denied the existence of the Natural Law itself, which even the “strict constructionist” Associate Justice Antonin Scalia says is irrelevant to judicial decision-making as he believes it to be “extraneous” to the text of the Constitution.

Scalia’s superb dissection of John Glover Roberts’s fallacious reasoning in the case of King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015, is thus vitiated by the fact that a constitution that admits of no higher authority than the words of its own text is going to be as meaningless as the plain language of Holy Writ or the documents issued by Holy Mother Church’s twenty authentic general councils:

The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says “Exchange established by the State” it means “Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.” That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so. . . .

The Court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the American people’s decision to give Congress “[a]ll legislative Powers” enumerated in the Constitution. Art. I, §1. They made Congress, not this Court, responsible for both making laws and mending them. This Court holds only the judicial power—the power to pronounce the law as Congress has enacted it. We lack the prerogative to repair laws that do not work out in practice, just as the people lack the ability to throw us out of office if they dislike the solutions we concoct. We must always remember, therefore, that “[o]ur task is to apply the text, not to improve upon it.” Pavelic & LeFlore v. Marvel Entertainment Group, Div. of Cadence Industries Corp., 493 U. S. 120, 126 (1989).

Trying to make its judge-empowering approach seem respectful of congressional authority, the Court asserts that its decision merely ensures that the Affordable Care Act operates the way Congress “meant [it] to operate.” Ante, at 17. First of all, what makes the Court so sure that Congress “meant” tax credits to be available everywhere? Our only evidence of what Congress meant comes from the terms of the law, and those terms show beyond all question that tax credits are available only on state Exchanges. More importantly, the Court forgets that ours is a government of laws and not of men. That means we are governed by the terms of our laws, not by the unenacted will of our lawmakers. “If Congress enacted into law something different from what it intended, then it should amend the statute to conform to its intent.” Lamie, supra, at 542. In the meantime, this Court “has no roving license . . . to disregard clear language simply on the view that . . . Congress ‘must have intended’ something broader.” Bay Mills, 572 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 11).

Even less defensible, if possible, is the Court’s claim that its interpretive approach is justified because this Act “does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation.” Ante, at 14–15. It is not our place to judge the quality of the care and deliberation that went into this or any other law. A law enacted by voice vote with no deliberation whatever is fully as binding upon us as one enacted after years of study, months of committee hearings, and weeks of debate. Much less is it our place to make everything come out right when Congress does not do its job properly. It is up to Congress to design its laws with care, and it is up to the people to hold them to account if they fail to carry out that responsibility.

Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act’s limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges. If Congress values above everything else the Act’s applicability across the country, it could make tax credits available in every Exchange. If it prizes state involvement in the Act’s implementation, it could continue to limit tax credits to state Exchanges while taking other steps to mitigate the economic consequences predicted by the Court. If Congress wants to accommodate both goals, it could make tax credits available everywhere while offering new incentives for States to set up their own Exchanges. And if Congress thinks that the present design of the Act works well enough, it could do nothing. Congress could also do something else altogether, entirely abandoning the structure of the Affordable Care Act. The Court’s insistence on making a choice that should be made by Congress both aggrandizes judicial power and encourages congressional lassitude.

Just ponder the significance of the Court’s decision to take matters into its own hands. The Court’s revision of the law authorizes the Internal Revenue Service to spend tens of billions of dollars every year in tax credits on federal Exchanges. It affects the price of insurance for millions of Americans. It diminishes the participation of the States in the implementation of the Act. It vastly expands the reach of the Act’s individual mandate, whose scope depends in part on the availability of credits. What a parody today’s decision makes of Hamilton’s assurances to the people of New York: “The legislature not only commands the purse but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over . . . the purse; no direction . . . of the wealth of society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

* * *

Today’s opinion changes the usual rules of statutory interpretation for the sake of the Affordable Care Act. That, alas, is not a novelty. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, 567 U. S. ___, this Court revised major components of the statute in order to save them from unconstitutionality. The Act that Congress passed provides that every individual “shall” maintain insurance or else pay a “penalty.” 26 U. S. C. §5000A. This Court, however, saw that the Commerce Clause does not authorize a federal mandate to buy health insurance. So it rewrote the mandate-cum-penalty as a tax. 567 U. S., at ___–___ (principal opinion) (slip op., at 15–45). The Act that Congress passed also requires every State to ccept an expansion of its Medi

caid program, or else risk losing all Medicaid funding. 42 U. S. C. §1396c. This Court, however, saw that the Spending Clause does not authorize this coercive condition. So it rewrote the law to withhold only the incremental funds associated with the Medicaid expansion. 567 U. S., at ___–___ (principal opinion) (slip op., at 45–58). Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has turned its attention to a third. The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State.” This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.

Perhaps the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will attain the enduring status of the Social Security Act or the Taft-Hartley Act; perhaps not. But this Court’s two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years. The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (“penalty” means tax, “further [Medicaid] payments to the State” means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, “established by the State” means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.

I dissent. (Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, joined by Associate Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015, p. 1, pp.18-21.)

As good as Scalia’s opinion is on the demerits of John Glover Roberts’s opinion in the case of King v. Burwell, June 25, 2015--and it is very, very good, he simply does not realize that most American judges are little different than those who served in Nazi Germany or Soviet Union—or even those who served in England at the time of Protestant Revolution. Once a civil state rejects the right of the Catholic Church as having ordained by God Himself to be the ultimate authority on all that pertains to the good of souls, those who wield power will rule as they please, up to and including the enacting of "racial purity" and "eugenics" laws such as existed in Nazi Germany. Who could stop them? They had the legal "authority" under the Constitution of the Weimar Republic to enact "emergency laws." Constitutions that admit of no higher authority than the words of their own text are like silly putty in the hands of a child: instruments that can be manipulated for whatever ends those who hold the reins of power desire. Nations that reject the Social Reign of Christ the King are governed according to the dictates of those who exercise civil power, men who care not for His Sacred Rights or who fear not the moment of their own Particular Judgments.

As Bishop Clemens von Galens noted in one of his sermons against the Nazi eugenics laws on Sunday, August 3, 1941:

For some months we have been heating reports that inmates of establishments for the care of the mentally ill who have been ill for a long period and perhaps appear incurable have been forcibly removed from these establishments on orders from Berlin. Regularly the relatives receive soon afterwards an intimation that the patient is dead, that the patient's body has been cremated and that they can collect the ashes. There is a general suspicion, verging on certainty. that these numerous unexpected deaths of the mentally ill do not occur naturally but are intentionally brought about in accordance with the doctrine that it is legitimate to destroy a so-called “worthless life”” in other words to kill innocent men and women, if it is thought that their lives are of no further value to the people and the state. A terrible doctrine which seeks to justify the murder of innocent people, which legitimises the violent killing of disabled persons who are no longer capable of work, of cripples, the incurably ill and the aged and infirm!

I am reliably informed that in hospitals and homes in the province of Westphalia lists are being prepared of inmates who are classified as “unproductive members of the national community” and are to be removed from these establishments and shortly thereafter killed. The first party of patients left the mental hospital at Marienthal, near Munster, in the course of this week.

German men and women! Article 211 of the German Penal Code is still in force, in these terms: “Whoever kills a man of deliberate intent is guilty of murder and punishable with death”. No doubt in order to protect those who kill with intent these poor men and women, members of our families, from this punishment laid down by law, the patients who have been selected for killing are removed from their home area to some distant place. Some illness or other is then given as the cause of death. Since the body is immediately cremated, the relatives and the criminal police are unable to establish whether the patient had in fact been ill or what the cause of death actually was. I have been assured, however, that in the Ministry of the Interior and the office of the Chief Medical Officer, Dr Conti, no secret is made of the fact that indeed a large number of mentally ill persons in Germany have already been killed with intent and that this will continue.

Article 139 of the Penal Code provides that “anyone who has knowledge of an intention to commit a crime against the life of any person . . . and fails to inform the authorities or the person whose life is threatened in due time . . . commits a punishable offence”. When I learned of the intention to remove patients from Marienthal I reported the matter on 28th July to the State Prosecutor of Munster Provincial Court and to the Munster chief of police by registered letter, in the following terms:

“According to information I have received it is planned in the course of this week (the date has been mentioned as 31st July) to move a large number of inmates of the provincial hospital at Marienthal, classified as ‘unproductive members of the national community’, to the mental hospital at Eichberg, where, as is generally believed to have happened in the case of patients removed from other establishments, they are to be killed with intent. Since such action is not only contrary to the divine and the natural moral law but under article 211 of the German Penal Code ranks as murder and attracts the death penalty, I hereby report the matter in accordance with my obligation under article 139 of the Penal Code and request that steps should at once be taken to protect the patients concerned by proceedings against the authorities planning their removal and murder, and that I may be informed of the action taken".

I have received no information of any action by the State Prosecutor or the police.

I had already written on 26th July to the Westphalian provincial authorities, who are responsible for the running of the mental hospital and for the patients entrusted to them for care and for cure, protesting in the strongest terms. It had no effect. The first transport of the innocent victims under sentence of death has left Marienthal. And I am now told that 800 patients have already been removed from the hospital at Warstein.

We must expect, therefore, that the poor defenceless patients are, sooner or later, going to be killed. Why? Not because they have committed any offence justifying their death, not because, for example, they have attacked a nurse or attendant, who would be entitled in legitimate selfdefence to meet violence with violence. In such a case the use of violence leading to death is permitted and may be called for, as it is in the case of killing an armed enemy.

No: these unfortunate patients are to die, not for some such reason as this but because in the judgment of some official body, on the decision of some committee, they have become “unworthy to live,” because they are classed as “unproductive members of the national community”.

The judgment is that they can no longer produce any goods: they are like an old piece of machinery which no longer works, like an old horse which has become incurably lame, like a cow which no longer gives any milk. What happens to an old piece of machinery? It is thrown on the scrap heap. What happens to a lame horse, an unproductive cow?

I will not pursue the comparison to the end so fearful is its appropriateness and its illuminating power.

But we are not here concerned with pieces of machinery; we are not dealing with horses and cows, whose sole function is to serve mankind, to produce goods for mankind. They may be broken up; they may be slaughtered when they no longer perform this function.

No: We are concerned with men and women, our fellow creatures, our brothers and sisters! Poor human beings, ill human beings, they are unproductive, if you will. But does that mean that they have lost the right to live? Have you, have I, the right to live only so long as we are productive, so long as we are recognised by others as productive?

If the principle that men is entitled to kill his unproductive fellow-man is established and applied, then woe betide all of us when we become aged and infirm! If it is legitimate to kill unproductive members of the community, woe betide the disabled who have sacrificed their health or their limbs in the productive process! If unproductive men and women can be disposed of by violent means, woe betide our brave soldiers who return home with major disabilities as cripples, as invalids! If it is once admitted that men have the right to kill “unproductive” fellow-men even though it is at present applied only to poor and defenceless mentally ill patients” then the way is open for the murder of all unproductive men and women: the incurably ill, the handicapped who are unable to work, those disabled in industry or war. The way is open, indeed, for the murder of all of us when we become old and infirm and therefore unproductive. Then it will require only a secret order to be issued that the procedure which has been tried and tested with the mentally ill should be extended to other “unproductive” persons, that it should also be applied to those suffering from incurable tuberculosis, the aged and infirm, persons disabled in industry, soldiers with disabling injuries!

Then no man will be safe: some committee or other will be able to put him on the list of “unproductive” persons, who in their judgment have become “unworthy to live”. And there will be no police to protect him, no court to avenge his murder and bring his murderers to justice.

Who could then have any confidence in a doctor? He might report a patient as unproductive and then be given instructions to kill him! It does not bear thinking of, the moral depravity, the universal mistrust which will spread even in the bosom of the family, if this terrible doctrine is tolerated, accepted and put into practice. Woe betide mankind, woe betide our German people, if the divine commandment, “Thou shalt not kill”, which the Lord proclaimed on Sinai amid thunder and lightning, which God our Creator wrote into man's conscience from the beginning, if this commandment is not merely violated but the violation is tolerated and remains unpunished!

This is the path that the Western world, including, of course, the so-called "civilized" United States of America, has been on as a direct, inevitable consequence of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King wrought by the Protestant Revolution and institutionalized thereafter in the structures of the anti-Incarnational, religiously indifferentist civil state of Modernity.

Nations that reject the Social Reign of Christ the King are sometimes formed by the shedding of innocent blood. As all nations that reject the Social Reign of Christ the King are founded on false, naturalistic principles, however, each will wind up shedding innocent blood, sooner or later, as there is no external constraint upon those who exercise power as existed during the era of Christendom in the Catholic Middle Ages. Over fifty-three million babies have been butchered in the United States of America under cover of law by surgical abortion alone since 1967, countless millions more as a result of abortifacient contraceptives. This unchecked shedding of blood creates a blood lust that is insatiable.

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Here To Stay, June 29, 2012

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