Salt and Light Blog

Today’s segment is where Jed Babbin proves himself to be confused on our form of government and its founding documents. As John Haskins will say later in the interview, Jed Babbin has a magnificent radio voice but he does not come off as too smart. Please listen:

Part 4 of Steve Deace’s Interview with Jed Babbin
(Please be patient downloading this audio file; it takes around 2 minutes)

Mr. Babbin says the Constitution is the supreme law of the land and that the Declaration of Independence is merely a background document. Mr. Babbin says, “The Declaration is not law at all.”

For someone to declare themselves a fairly good constitutional lawyer, Mr. Babbin does not understand the law very well. Steve brings up and John Haskins and he discuss it later in the broadcast, the Declaration of the Independence clearly is law. Scott Johnson of Power Line blog writes:

But does the Declaration have any legal status such that these words can truly be deemed to state the American creed? It does, although virtually no one seems to know it. In 1878 Congress enacted a revised version of the United States Code that included a new first section entitled “The Organic Laws of the United States.” The story behind the 1878 revision of the Code is told in the introduction to political scientist Richard Cox’s valuable book Four Pillars of Constitutionalism: The Organic Laws of the United States. (Cox credits the idea for the book to Professor Harry Jaffa, Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute.)

The Code is Congress’s official compilation of federal law; the organic laws of the United States are the country’s foundational laws. First and foremost of the four organic laws of the United States is the Declaration of Independence. Following the Declaration among the organic laws are the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

Additionally, as Steve and his caller Hugh rightly point out, in a representative republican form of government such as the United States of America, the highest law of the land is God’s laws. The writer of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson himself, made the following statement:

“God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of people that these liberties are of the Gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.”

It is this misunderstanding of our founding documents that we are told the courts can make law or some court ruling is the law of the land. Many conservative organizations, some of them Christian, claim that they need our money to fight judicial tyranny. I wrote in my Talon series “Ravaging the Republic”:

Tyranny is defined as “arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.” It is impossible for the judiciary to be tyrannical because it has NO POWERS to exercise or abuse. The public has been lied to when it is told that some court has enacted some law through judicial tyranny.

In the next segment we will hear Jed Babbin perpetrate that lie.

Next Post: There Is a Cancer in Conservatism (Part 5)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Christian Activism, Christianity, Conservatism, Constitution, Culture, Democrats, election, Judiciary, Media, Morality, Politics, Republicans, RINOs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.