What Judges Actually Do, Madison’s Flaw, and the Fall of Civilization: Law Lacks Human Ambition

Why is it that every government office wants to expand their power, except courts. Courts alone claim to be good stewards of the taxpayers’ money, and censors of their own power. The short answer is they’re lying. It’s propaganda. So what’s really going on, and what does this fake prudence of courts have to do with the fall of civilization?

Every other government office grows their business, by spending more money and expanding their power. Courts get what they want by saying it’s none of our business, and it’s too expensive to make it our business.

And the reason why, is because when courts do spend the money and make things their business, they don’t get to do what they want. They have to follow the law.

As puppets of the law in formal court proceedings, judges don’t create power. Not unless they use those proceedings not to enforce law, but to hand away power. And divorce power from law. So since law shrinks power, judges grow power by shrinking their job.

Jury trials, and honest court proceedings, take power away from government officials and give it to dead legislators and jurors. Being a slave to law and formal procedure, is abrasive to human impulses. The law is not any judge’s ambition. Avoiding the law is.

A juror doing what a juror wants is not a judge’s ambition. Avoiding jurors is. And so at the exact moment James Madison says “ambition must be made to counteract ambition”, courts say “we’re going home”. Judges going home unchains ambition from law like a dog.

Madison’s idea that one government official will have the ambition to check another government official — not by deciding things himself, but by letting jurors and dead legislators decide — didn’t work in Madison’s time or today.

Creating Power by Shrinking Judicial Process

People like to talk about why civilizations fall. You can see a fatal flaw in our civilization, in a recent Supreme Court case.

In the White House ballroom case, National Park Service v. National Trust, the Supreme Court delivered the standard line of judges: The Court said “We don’t want this power. We don’t want everyone coming to courts to solve their problems.”

“usher in a world where virtually every citizen had standing… federal courts do not operate as an open forum for citizens”

National Park Service v. National Trust

Can you imagine a retail business owner making a similar objection, that too many people would come to his store for everything they want? Can you imagine a Congressman or sheriff complaining that people would come to him to solve all their problems? No other government office complains about growing their business.

But the Supreme Court complained like courts always do, that expanding their power would give them more work.

And the reason why, is that’s not courts’ real objection. It’s just propaganda. Having too much work or too much power isn’t judges real objection. Following the law is.

Never mind how expensive it would be — how much work it would be — for every voter in every election to decide whether or not to build a White House Ballroom; to learn about and think about and debate and litigate this issue at every kitchen table. We would waste more energy on direct democracy, than on a million courts. Competing policy gurus promoting political issues to gullible parrots in the street, is a time-consuming and acrimonious process. Especially for questions legislation has already answered.

But the Supreme Court knows this. Judges know voters can’t really monitor every government employee in their so-called “chain of dependence”. The Supreme Court knows 100 million voters can’t decide something more cheaply than 100 legislators or 10 judges can. Courts saying direct democracy is more efficient than courts isn’t really about cost. This is a power grab, disguised as a power forfeiture.

By not spending the money and not doing the work, judges take power away from jurors and dead legislators, and instead give it to their friends and their faction — people they know. Judges use the cost excuse to create money and power for their lawyer friends.

It’s not the work that judges don’t like, it’s what the work is designed to produce. Which is following the law. Which the people present would rather not do, when their ambition is to instead make deals and do whatever they want. When Madison’s ambition enters the room, judges go home and take the law with them.

But judges can’t tell you that having jury trials would get a result the law wants rather than what the powerful people in the room want. So instead they say oh, it’s too much work, it costs too much money. They say voters are virtuous, it’s their right to decide who is guilty. In reality, voters have no idea what police are doing in the street or what is going on in individual criminal cases. This is just a power grab to hide things from voters. Judges let their friends decide things, while the voters are somewhere else watching a circus.

Judges’ real objection isn’t “lack of judicial resources”. It’s that enforcing the law in honest court proceedings would take away all their decision power, and enslave them and every other elected official.

Judges actual objection, is to being forced to listen to witnesses whom they have no control over what they say. And to letting jurors decide whom to believe and follow the law. Judges are the heirs that want to break the will and sell the house, so they can instead get what they want.

51% of legislators get what they want. Cops get to decide whom to shoot, and lie about it. But when judges do their jobs they have no say, the law decides for them. What courts do was never judges’ business to begin with, it was the law’s business, it was commands written by dead people. Judges breaking the law takes the power back, and puts it under control of the living.

Judges expand their power by breaking the bonds of their enslavement, which is the law. And giving the decision to someone else outside courts who doesn’t have to follow the law.

Legislation is Never Embodied in Human Ambition

Every government office wants to expand its power. The welfare office wants more people on welfare, more programs with more money to do more things. But courts say every day: We don’t want everyone coming to court to get what they want. Having all this power would create too much work for us. We hear every day from the judiciary that their dockets are full, they don’t want more business.

Judges don’t want more jury trials. Judges certainly don’t want everything decided by jury trials, like the other branches want to decide everything. Judges are sent on a mission to seize decision-power back from the words of dead people, by rejecting their own job.

Meanwhile, lawyers and prosecutors do want to make more money and get elected. So judges say let the lawyers decide. Let the politicians who get elected decide. Let the decisions be made by people who want to make them, because doing so can serve their ambition.

The reason we use juries, is because they are not corrupted by ambition, by their own agenda. But judges take power away from juries and dead legislators, and give it to the living people in the room who stand to benefit. Who benefit from torturing the innocent, to get elected.

A jury decision doesn’t serve a judge’s ambition. It doesn’t make money for him. Or increase his status, unless it’s on TV. It just creates work for him. So there’s no ambition of a judge to let a jury decide. He says I don’t want to hold a jury trial, and the law says I can’t decide myself, so I am going to bed. Let the lawyers decide.

Judges don’t profit from jury trials. Prosecutors don’t get elected from it. Lawyers don’t make money off it. Nobody has an ambition to let strangers decide things for him. People who have power, don’t profit from jury trials giving power to nobodies.

There’s no human impulse, to stand aside and give decisions to someone else, in this cases jurors and the law. Being forced to hold court proceedings, and then making them honest, doesn’t serve any human impulse of judges, or make any profit for them, or expand their power.

Being forced to do what the law says based on what the witnesses say, makes judges and their peers into slaves. It makes lawyers and elected officials into puppets, into robots. No ambition is served by a judge having witnesses tell the truth, and jurors decide what to do.

The reality is powerful people don’t won’t nobodies coming to court, to solve their problems. Because courts take power away from the powerful. And make them all stand there like servants, while the witnesses and jurors and legislation decide.

Telling the truth in court creates power for no man and only the law.

Legislation has No Local Representative

James Madison said “ambition must be made to counteract ambition”. But legislation has no person whose ambition or profit represents it. There’s no individual in the room, no local actor, who gathers and accumulates wealth, or maximizes his power, by enforcing legislation.

So Madison’s “ambition”, doesn’t result in old legislation being enforced. Not after the people who wrote it are dead. Ambition results in old legislation being rewritten into new case law, which makes lawyers money and gives government employees power.

And that is a fatal flaw of the United States today.

Judges will tell you they love that old legislation. And that what that old legislation actually says, is that someone alive today decides. Not courts and law. Never mind this isn’t actually written anywhere. “The Unitary Executive” and executive-branch immunity, aren’t legislated anywhere.

But judges say these things must be what those dead people wanted when they were alive, to do whatever they wanted in their time. People always wanted to throw off the shackles of law. Or couldn’t understand being regulated by law in formal procedure, rather than through social power dynamics. And that makes lawlessness the law today. Regardless of what old legislators wrote.

People who observed a king, must have understood that is how society worked. So that is what the “unwritten law” says, that government doesn’t have to follow the law.

So judges and politicians — government employees — hate legislation and their first job is evading it. And no powerful person wants it enforced.

You might say what about the ambition of powerful people to have legislation enforced, when they’re affected by it? You might say powerful people complain about courts being dishonest every day. But could any judge avoid that by holding honest proceedings? No, a judge can only avoid that by producing the outcome the fewest people complain about. Or better yet, by not even producing any court outcome at all. By letting the factions take their fight somewhere else. Which both sides want.

Powerful people aren’t angry that judges didn’t enforce legislation. They’re angry about the outcome regardless of legislation, and angry that courts get to decide at all. The powerful can negotiate with police and corrupt and influence them, and donate to them. But they can’t negotiate with something written by a dead person.

Powerful people don’t complain about law being enforced in general, they complain about specific decisions. And their solution isn’t law being enforced in general, it’s courts not making any decisions.

So judges take power away from the law, and it give it to the local social system. They want to let prosecutors who win elections, and lawyers who make money, decide cases.

And then pretend it’s up to the voters to decide. Politicians tell voters “If you want something, dead legislators and courts can’t help you. You need to talk to me.” So rich people sit in back rooms, and poor people stand in the street with torches, and dead legislators lie silent in the ground.

Law is not any powerful man’s ambition, but a prison for it. For ambitious people to fulfill their ambition, whether it’s jurors or judges or police or lawyers, the first thing they have to do is to take away power from the law. And nobody counters that ambition, with an ambition to enforce law itself.

Making sure that powerful people don’t complain about court outcomes, or producing court outcomes that the participating lawyers don’t complain about, or even that voters don’t complain about in the few cases when voters are watching, is the opposite of following the law. It’s following social dynamics, where might makes right.

Ambitions of Judges Versus Businessmen

When a businessman serves prices — when he accepts prices as they are, and discovers that people will pay $2 for widgets and he can get them in China for $1 — he gets rich from it. When a judge figures out what the law is and accepts it and follows it, he doesn’t get anything for himself. He gets hate and blowback from powerful people who didn’t get what they want.

In exchange for doing what prices say all day, a businessman gets to do what he wants at night. It’s designed to work that way. A businessman gets to insert his own price by buying a boat. But a judge who enforces the law so that he can occasionally break the law, has to break the system to do so.

A judge who enforces the law so that he can sometimes insert his own preferences, has to break the joints of the law to get this flexibility. And once judges create the flexibility to sometimes get what they want, it’s a free-for-all, for lawyers and politicians and businesses.

So the ambition of judges is to break enough joints of the law, that they can do what they want and serve actual ambition. The job of judges is to break the joints of the law, to instead serve the ambitions of lawyers.

You might say the ambition of a judge is to have social status. But you can get the social status of being a judge, without holding a single jury trial. You can have that social status and still minimize your work. And one of the ways judges break the joints of law is just to minimize their work. They can have the social status of being a judge, but just say I’m not taking any cases, you guys settle it outside court. Unless the case is on TV, then I’ll do law all day.

Judges increase their social status even more, by giving the decision to their lawyer peers instead of law. But then putting on their law cloak when it’s televised.

But make no mistake, when the Supreme Court says we don’t want to fix this problem — like in National Park Service v, National Trust — it’s not that they really don’t want to fix the problem or don’t have an ambition to decide it one way or the other. It’s that not enforcing law, and instead saying something is none of courts’ business, is judges way of doing what they want. Not taking a case, not letting law see the problem — closing the eyes of law — is judges’ way of getting the outcome they choose. Judges let someone outside court choose the outcome judges want, and then say it’s none of courts’ business.

Judges can fix the world like any idealist, by closing their eyes.

Suppose your ambition is to promote your religion. And the law says government can’t promote a religion. In that case, your ambition is to become a judge. And then say you know what, government promoting a religion is none of courts’ business.

If you want to do something, and the law says you can’t, then your ambition is to become a judge and say this thing I want done is none of courts’ business.

If a judge wants X, and law says people can’t do X, the judge’s way of getting X is by saying X is none of his business. It’s not that the judge has no ambition to decide X. It’s that the judge getting what he wants, is achieved by saying X is not the business of the law or courts. X may be illegal. But it’s none of courts’ business to enforce the law. A judge can’t choose to do something illegal, but can choose to step aside and let someone else do it.

A judge says I want X, the law says no, it’s not up to law to solve this problem, I’m going to say it’s up to the executive branch to solve this problem. And then lie that voters can see what’s going on and have time to think about it, and it’s up to voters to decide.

And that’s how the judge gets what he wants. A judge’s ambition is not just to do nothing or break the joints of the law, but to completely shut down the role of courts. A judge’s job is not to speak for dead legislators, it’s to shut them out.

Not just because deciding things is a lot of work and doesn’t help him. But because making sure that courts don’t decide things, making sure law doesn’t dictate decisions, is how a judge with an agenda gets what he wants.

But judges do have an ambition. Ands the easiest way to break the joints of the law and instead serve judges’ ambition, is to say courts don’t decide this issue, someone else does.

So judges don’t just come in with an ambition to not do anything, and just have the social status of being a judge doing minimal work. They come with an agenda specifically to break the joints of the law, so that factions operating outside courts can get what the judge wants.

Judges’ ambition is have the social status of being called a judge, and to make sure people they know get good treatment, and the laws they don’t like get ignored, and their agenda is served. Not to be slaves to the law all day.

Who Will Represent Legislation?

Lawyers don’t get paid by being zealous for broke people in prison. They get paid to pretend that criminal defendants have a lawyer, to check that box. Like extras on a movie set. We have a right to jury trials, but no right that lawyers be paid for representing us at trial. Lawyers are penalized for demanding jury trials. Lawyers are penalized for not getting their clients to say what powerful people want them to say.

Neither criminal-process rights, nor enforcing any other legislation makes money for lawyers. Except protecting big-business cash flows. The Supreme Court says the only injury allowed in court is a cash injury. Because lawyers don’t get paid in religion, or other values. So when government employees start screwing with big-business cash flows, courts say give us our job back, we’re in the office today.

The Supreme Court only enforces the law, when their peers can make money off businesses by doing so. And breaks the law regularly, to serve other impulses such as pursuing their own ideology and vision, helping their peers get elected, and generally giving power to living factions other than the law.

Nobody complains that court proceedings are a charade, because it’s the goal of every person who controls them, to corrupt them. That’s the goal of every living person with any power. There may be two sides represented in the room, or three or four. And legislation comes in fifth, with nobody in the room.

I won’t make a dollar, or even get 100 views, for telling you here that court proceedings are dishonest and making them more honest is critical for the survival of our civilization. This makes me enemies, and gets me called evil, and a heretic. Lawyers see the things I say as costing them money or power. Voters don’t want juries deciding, when voters are told that it’s instead up to voters to decide.

Nobody’s ambition is channeled into enforcing law in general, only citing law at the moment and to the extent it dovetails with what they want. But such citations are rarely an effective check on social power dynamics. Judges scoff at lawyers who try. And smash them with smug lies and sophistry, throw their cases in the trash without reading them.

Nobody wants honest court proceedings, they all want particular outcomes. Honest court proceedings are a pillar of our civilization, but they serve the profit and impulse of no one.

No Individual Impulse to Conserve Civilization

Civilizations overall have incentives to do things, to survive. But if those things aren’t constructed from incentives facing individuals, they don’t get done.

It doesn’t matter what it is, it could be that the survival of a civilization depends on everyone saying the word “bird” every day at noon. But if no individual profits or loses from whether he says bird or not, and doing so is not his natural impulse, the civilization will end. If that’s not translated into a profit for any individual to serve those interests, if no human impulses are channeled into serving those interests, they aren’t served. And the competing interests of individuals overwhelm and destroy them.

So it is with honest court proceedings. They give no power to judges, and lawyers and politicians do not profit from giving power to witnesses and laws.

Providing honest court proceedings only gives power to the law, and does not serve the impulses or increase the profits of judges in any way. The power and joy of a judge comes from choosing based on his own whims, not from following the law.

People who claim to favor law are as common as people claiming any other virtue, none of them do. Powerful people like law, the way fat people like dieting. They talk a lot about it, and get fatter.

Everyone from police to rich people wants to subvert court proceedings to their own interest. Sheriffs and lawyers won’t complain that court proceedings are charades, they want them to be. No participant in court proceedings with any power over whether they are honest, has his impulses served or his profits increased by making sure they are honest and serve the law. Impulses are actually served by making them a charade.

Increasing the number of jury trials benefits society, but neither voters nor judges perceive that benefit. So regardless of what the law says, there won’t be jury trials. While any jury trials there are forced to be, will be fixed with lying witnesses. Only if they’re on TV, or a lot of people are watching, the lawyers will put on a theater hiding what judges and lawyers do every other day.

Demand a jury, and the judge will punish you for it by letting the prosecution lie. And your lawyer is not allowed to tell the jury a thing about that.

Believing the propaganda of judges, that they enforce the law, is the dumbest thing you can do as a citizen. Judges count on you not looking into the millions of pages to see what they’re actually doing. Which is ending our nation so that their lawyer peers can make a profit and get elected. They will pretend they enforce law, when the TV cameras are on. And lawyers who admit otherwise and threaten the power, get swift consequences from their peers. But when you go into court, judges will do everything they can to give the power to someone other than law or jurors.

Courts don’t actually do anything. Courts are a theater, hollow of any ambition of the people who run them, to do what they’re supposed to do. Law is only enforced — law only works or does anything — for as long as the people who wrote it are still alive and want it. Courts are an ancestral ritual put on like Christmas, for social groups to do what they want, dress it up, and present it as something else.

The Turnover of Civilizations

Regulating human behavior based on what a law written 200 years ago says, is critical for our nation to survive. But no person alive today actually benefits from it. No judge gets elected, no lawyer makes money, by letting witnesses, jurors, and the law, decide what government does.

Honest court proceedings are critical to our civilization. But they don’t serve any human impulse or ambition, for the people who are trusted to make them honest. Nothing can fix this. And our civilization can no more function without judicial process than it can without private business.

When people want something, they will write down a law. But it is because they want it, not the law itself much less courts, that will enforce it. Today people want our civilization less than others want to destroy it, so they will destroy it.

America will fail because law itself has neither ambition nor impulse nor profit. Quite the opposite following the law makes men slaves, and neither judges nor anybody else wants that job.

Law cannot conserve our civilization, when its enforcement is not constructed from incentives facing individuals. We stopped amending the Constitution when we instead chose the path of police and prosecutor immunity. Voters have since lost interest in legislation. When voters perceive no advantage from giving decisions to legislation or protecting individuals, such trends seem to end with big changes rather than gradual turns.

Civilization benefits from law being enforced, but people in power benefit from law not being enforced. Law has no profit or ambition of its own, and therefore no voice. And so our civilization will die from lack of law itself having individuals who obtain immediate concrete benefits from its enforcement.