Insane isn’t the word for this decision. I don’t know if there are useful words for it. If there’s a SCOTUS decision so insane that it will make federal and state authorities just shrug and ignore it, it would be this one.
Jimcy McGirt, 71, is challenging an Oklahoma state court’s jurisdiction over him in his convictions in 1997 for a series of sex crimes. A Wagoner County District Court judge sentenced him that year to more than a millennia in prison.
McGirt was convicted of first-degree rape by instrumentation, lewd molestation and forcible sodomy, all after a former conviction, according to court documents. He previously served a five-year prison term for a sodomy conviction.
And, according to the Oklahoma attorney general’s response to the petition, they were committed against a child.
“McGirt challenges this judgment and sentence as void without subject matter jurisdiction because McGirt is an enrolled member of the federally recognized Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and the alleged crimes were allegedly committed in Indian Country,” McGirt wrote in his self-filed petition to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A true inspiration to jailhouse lawyers everywhere. So obviously the Democrat judges and Gorsuch decided that a chunk of Tulsa and Oklahoma should be considered a reservation because… a child rapist asked him to.
The dissent by the conservative justices starts off with this scathing opening...
In 1997, the State of Oklahoma convicted petitioner Jimcy McGirt of molesting, raping, and forcibly sodomizing a four-year-old girl, his wife’s granddaughter. McGirt was sentenced to 1,000 years plus life in prison. Today, the Court holds that Oklahoma lacked jurisdiction to prosecute McGirt—on the improbable ground that, unbeknownst to anyone for the past century, a huge swathe of Oklahoma is actually a Creek Indian reservation, on which the State may not prosecute serious crimes committed by Indians like McGirt. Not only does the Court discover a Creek reservation that spans three million acres and includes most of the city of Tulsa, but the Court’s reasoning portends that there are four more such reservations in Oklahoma. The rediscovered reservations encompass the entire eastern half of the State—19 million acres that are home to 1.8 million people, only 10%–15% of whom are Indians.
Across this vast area, the State’s ability to prosecute serious crimes will be hobbled and decades of past convictions could well be thrown out. On top of that, the Court has profoundly destabilized the governance of eastern Oklahoma. The decision today creates significant uncertainty for the State’s continuing authority over any area that touches Indian affairs, ranging from zoning and taxation to family…
You can read the rest yourself.
Oklahoma now has a bad choice between asking Congress to fix this mess, and good luck with that considering the Pelosi regime’s death grip on the House… or doing the sensible thing and, in cooperation with the White House and the DOJ, ignoring it.
This is a decision so stupid that if there was ever a case for telling the Supreme Court to go to hell… it’s this one.
As we’ve seen in previous bad Roberts and Gorsuch decisions, the problem is judicial supremacism.
A handful of men and women in black robes shouldn’t be able to treat the country like their private pinball machine, no matter their views or their character. Power corrupts. America was built on the fundamental idea that a handful of unelected people shouldn’t have that kind of power. The power of the judiciary was always a coup against the Republic.
If there was ever a time to rebel against judicial supremacism, and to follow in the footsteps of Abe Lincoln, it’s now.
“To consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions,” Abraham Lincoln said, quoting Thomas Jefferson during the Lincoln-Douglas debates, would be “a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy”.
The way out of this mess is to end the “despotism of an oligarchy” that Jefferson warned us it would become, endowed with the power to overrule the other bodies of government that have no check on it except through the appointment of its members, and restore the rightful rule of the Constitution.
Democrats and Republicans bemoan the power of the courts, but continue to believe in judicial supremacism, a doctrine that is not only dangerous and wrong, but has led directly to this conflict.
Republicans define their party by Lincoln, and Democrats by Jefferson and Jackson. All three men rejected judicial supremacism and the unlimited power of a judiciary over the political system.
Jefferson and Jackson viewed the Supreme Court and the other bodies of government as equals.
What does that mean? It means, in Jefferson’s words that the Constitution meant for the three branches of government to be “co-equal and co-sovereign”, and, in Jackson’s words, that “the Congress, the Executive and the Court must each for itself be guided by its own opinion of the Constitution.”
That is what Thomas Jefferson thought. Maybe it’s time we took him more seriously than a bunch of hacks from the current era.
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