Dear Justice Kavanaugh,
Congratulations on your confirmation to the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS). The confirmation process you and your family faced was very harsh and contentious, but you prevailed, and most of us out here in fly-over country support you firmly.
However, we ask for your serious and thoughtful consideration of a few ideas that we hope will remain at the top of your mind as you move forward with your service. Our two most pressing concerns are individual liberty and the separation of powers between the executive and judiciary branches of our government. Many perceptions of your previous decisions are viewed negatively and cause great concern, even among conservatives.
Protection of Liberty is Your Duty
First, we feel the protection of individual liberty through interpretation of the original text of the U.S. Constitution is the primary duty of the Supreme Court. However, in light of your previous opinions and decisions in lower courts, plus public testimony, we respectfully request you consider the following:
Stare decisis should not apply to rulings concerning the U.S. Constitution’s meaning. While precedent is crucial to consistency in rulings pertaining to legislation following the Constitution, we feel interpreting the supreme law of the land should only occur through the original text and meaning.
Life is the first of our unalienable rights and is foundational to the existence of modern views on human rights. Today’s science confirms human beings are created at conception in the reproductive process and therefore attain this unalienable right at that moment. We ask that you consider all your judicial opinions and decisions through the lens of this most precious unalienable right without consideration of precedent.
Religious liberty is under attack and Justices in your position have made decisions recently which have put religious liberty in danger. Government force should never be used to prevent a citizen from practicing deeply-held religious beliefs if reasonable efforts are made to accommodate others. Governments are attempting to force business owners who have exercised their religious liberty (in spite of SCOTUS ruling against them) and one woman was even jailed by a federal judge for following her religious beliefs in recent years when all she requested was reasonable accommodation. Freedom of conscience rights must be defended aggressively by you and the rest of the SCOTUS body. We do not ask government to force others to follow our beliefs, but only that our rights of conscience be respected equally.
Our right to keep and bear arms is directly linked to our right to life, to protect out families, and our property. We ask that you take every opportunity to defend this right and ensure each citizen, even if they live in New York City, has the same opportunity to exercise this right. State and local governments are currently attempting to further infringe on this right, putting lives at risk.
The right to free speech seems to face rising opposition from all directions. As Americans we’ve been raised to know that the answer to speech we oppose…is more speech, not less. We have seen government power used to remove works of art in disagreement with current cultural norms, action that has normally generated protection from the courts, even though some art was thought to be obscene. I implore you to remember the concept that brought our great nation to its present greatness, vigorously defending speech we disagree with, so we will be free to express our ideas without fear.
Freedom of association is at risk. A chilling public climate has grown over the last few years as one part of our society has been constantly smeared first as racist, then misogynist, and now as Nazis…simply because they believe in the constitution or have a family heritage they want to preserve. We beseech you to consider further protections of our right to be free from fear in our associations.
Our Fourth Amendment rights are at their weakest since this nation’s founding. With the passage of the Patriot Act after the attacks on September 11, 2001, citizens like me, who survived the attack on the Pentagon that day, thought it was a good idea to give up these rights in the short term, and you actually agreed in court opinions. Now, however, 17 years have passed, and we’ve witnessed abuses of surveillance against individuals that were actually used to spy on a Presidential campaign and are currently being used to investigate and attempt to remove a duly elected President. Sir, it is time to restore our right to be secure in our persons, papers, and be free from warrantless searches and seizures. We also highly encourage the court conduct a full review of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. Any reasonable citizen recognizes the most egregious abuses of the system occurred within the Department of Justice, the FBI, and intelligence-source interactions. These actions may have included allied intelligence agencies and even our own CIA. The approval of warrants aimed at a 2016 presidential campaign operative using unverified documents constructed with suspect foreign intelligence sources and funded by the Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee, needs to be investigated and reviewed by the Court immediately if FISA is going to continue in law. However, it is time to repeal FISA and the Patriot Act.
Executive Powers Have Expanded
Second, we have seen the powers of the executive expand during the 20th Century and with ever-increasing dangerous swiftness since the September 11, 2001 attack and our response. This expansion has encroached on the enumerated powers of both the legislative and judicial branches of our constitutional government. We see our time to make a correction back to the enumerated powers of our separate but equal branches of government as limited, but our opportunity has increased due to your confirmation to the SCOTUS. To the citizen, this re-balancing of power is necessary to restore individual liberty and our ability to wield the powers of the government we established through our inherent right and for our mutual benefit.
Specifically, the executive branch has encroached dramatically into judicial power through its department of justice by stepping away from the bedrock principle of the presumption of innocence and due process. You have personally felt the searing heat of accusation without benefit of a presumption of innocence and due process in the recent confirmation hearings. Average citizens are feeling it in real courtrooms and investigative processes of the executive branch all the time. Just ask college students who’ve been accused of sexual crimes on campus about their experiences both in the campus process forced upon them by federal law, and in the courtrooms. Campus experiences highlight the absence of due process and presumption of innocence. No campus is excluded, either in the Ivy League schools, such as Yale where a young man was recently found not guilty in court, or in local colleges like Roanoke College. The experiences have been the same: unless you can get your case to an actual court of law, male students find themselves expelled and without much recourse to clear their names.
The FISA and Patriot Act concerns we previously raised concerning individual liberty are also encroachments on due process that must be addressed by SCOTUS. The reputation of FISA courts and judges is that they rarely deny surveillance warrants since the threshold standard of probable cause is so high. This perception is repugnant to us and we ask for immediate review and relief by SCOTUS, especially in light of the facts revealed about the espionage conducted upon the Trump campaign in 2016, first by FBI counter-intelligence and later by federal criminal investigators, all without a defensive briefing or the knowledge of first candidate Trump, and now President Trump, until a congressional investigation informed him. The most recent revelations by the Congress confirm abuses of the FISA process by the executive branch.
Justice Kavanaugh, SCOTUS must act in its capacity as the independent review of the imbalance of executive power in the judicial system, and we implore you to act quickly in your new role…to help restore this imbalance.
Sincerely,
American Citizens
