A question for conservatives who think Kim Davis should "follow the law" or resign

I have a question for my fellow conservatives unsympathetic with Kim Davis' refusal to issue marriage licenses.

A number of conservatives have said that they think Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis should either "follow the law" or resign her position. The "rule of law," they say, is all-important and cannot be defied without threatening our very form of government.

So, here is my question:

Given that the Supreme Court defied the rule of law in a manner, given their power and office, far more destructive to our form of government (by ignoring the plain language of the Constitution, defying precedent, and just flat out making stuff up) than Kim Davis could do in fifty lifetimes, why did you never call on the five justices who made up the High Court's majority in the Obergefell decision to "follow the law or resign"?

I just find it ironic that their standards for the behavior of public officials is higher for a lowly county clerk than it is for an exalted member of the nation's highest court.

And let's not say that the Court has the right and responsibility to "interpret the Constitution." That dog most definitely won't hunt, since there is a legitimate distinction between interpretation and policy-making and the Court has defied as egregiously as it possible to defy it, and the argument that the Court has the right to do this on the basis of Marbury vs. Madison basically amounts to saying that the Supreme Court can do what the Supreme Court wants to do because it says so.

My op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader: "Introducing Our New Ruling Elite"

My newest op-ed in the Lexington Herald-Leader:

In his dissent in last week's Obergefell v. Hodges Supreme Court decision prohibiting states from defining marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman, Justice Antonin Scalia pointed out that every member of the Supreme Court was a graduate of Yale or Harvard law schools. This is, he said, "hardly a cross-section of America" ...

Read more here.

Even some liberals admitting Supreme's decision on same-sex marriage a "logical disaster"

Even some liberals admitting Supreme's decision on same-sex marriage a "logical disaster"

When all of the partying over the liberal's political victory in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision abates, they're going to realize an ugly truth: the majority decision by Justice Anthony Kennedy is an intellectual embarrassment.

Granted, this realization will take a while, since contemporary liberals care as little but the Constitution actually says as the five justices who just rewrote it. But, although they really don't care about the Constitution, they at least try to keep up the pretension of being rational.

If conservatives play it right, they can hang this albatross around the liberal neck.

Here is Brian Beutler, writing in the liberal New Republic in an article titled, "Anthony Kennedy’s Same-Sex Marriage Opinion Was a Logical Disaster":

Outside of academic specialties, historic Supreme Court decisions aren’t generally taught as logical treatises, but as watershed moments, which is great news for Kennedy because his opinion in Obergefell is, logically speaking, kind of a disaster.

Read more here.

Scalia: The Supreme Court's "Judicial Putsch"

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, from his dissent in Obergefell v. Hodges, on the pigs ruling the Orwellian barnyard and how they are rewriting the Constitution:

But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch. The five Justices who compose today’s majority are entirely comfortable concluding that every State violated the Constitution for all of the 135 years between the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification and Massachusetts’ permitting of same-sex marriages in 2003. They have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a “fundamental right” overlooked by every person alive at the time of ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since. They see what lesser legal minds—minds like Thomas Cooley, John Marshall Harlan, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Learned Hand, Louis Brandeis, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Cardozo, Hugo Black, Felix Frankfurter, Robert Jackson, and Henry Friendly—could not. They are certain that the People ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to bestow on them the power to remove questions from the democratic process when that is called for by their “reasoned judgment.” These Justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry. And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that, who adheres to what was, until 15 years ago, the unanimous judgment of all generations and all societies, stands against the Constitution.

Read more here.

Scalia: "No social transformation without representation"

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, from his dissent in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision striking down marriage laws in all 50 states, on just how unrepresentative of America the elite judges who now rule our country are:

Judges are selected precisely for their skill as lawyers; whether they reflect the policy views of a particular con­stituency is not (or should not be) relevant. Not surpris­ingly then, the Federal Judiciary is hardly a cross-section of America. Take, for example, this Court, which consists of only nine men and women, all of them successful lawyers who studied at Harvard or Yale Law School. Four of the nine are natives of New York City. Eight of them grew up in east- and west-coast States. Only one hails from the vast expanse in-between. Not a single South-westerner or even, to tell the truth, a genuine Westerner (California does not count). Not a single evangelical Christian (a group that comprises about one quarter of Americans), or even a Protestant of any denomination. The strikingly unrepresentative character of the body voting on today’s social upheaval would be irrelevant if they were functioning as judges, answering the legal question whether the American people had ever ratified a constitutional provision that was understood to proscribe the traditional definition of marriage. But of course the Justices in today’s majority are not voting on that basis; they say they are not. And to allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.

Read the rest here.