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Ivan W.
Parkins |
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To order Dr. Parkins book, Perspectives For
American Society Contact |
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©Ivan W. Parkins 2009, All articles, text, web pages property of
Ivan W. Parkins. Use of any material
requires permission of the author
and can be obtained by contacting,
info@americanpoliticalcommentary.com |
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About Ivan W. Parkins: Dr. Parkins is a retired professor of
Political Science from Central Michigan University. He received his PhD from the University of
Chicago and is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy. Dr. Parkins served as a naval officer
during WWII aboard the battleship Alabama.
He is a recent widower with three daughters, 3 grand children and 2
great grand children. Dr. Parkins has
written extensively, having authored 3 books and a newspaper opinion column
for many years. |
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Front Page |
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Editors Note: Dr.
Parkins’s Grandson, Breton W. Hinkle, passed away unexpectedly on Feb. 14,
2009. He leaves his wife Jen, parents
Ray and Susan Hinkle, sister, Gretchen Hinkle, Richard and Kathy Bourque,
Father and Mother in law, brother in laws Kevin and Brian and sister in law,
Kelly. He was a graduate of Michigan
State University. Bret was a United
States Marine and had faithfully served his country with honor and
distinction. He will be terribly
missed by family and friends. He was loved by all who knew him. He was
buried with military honors in Holland, MI. See Bret’s life story at
http://www.lifestorynet.com/memories/45526/ |
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THE SUPREME COURT AND IT’S CAPACITY TO JUDGE By Ivan
W. Parkins
Americans should be very skeptical of the Supreme Court’s judgments
where they relate heavily to factual aspects of a
case. The reason for that is
clear. The Supreme Court’s jurisdiction is overwhelmingly
appellate, i.e. it reviews cases based upon records of fact and law
established elsewhere. Trials occur in
lower courts or administrative
tribunals. Usually, the result
then goes to at least one appellate tribunal such as a U.S. court of appeals
or a state supreme court. What the U.
S. Supreme Court finally gets is a written record, and sometimes an oral
summary, of what has happened two stages below. Its primary duty is to rule upon whether or
not lower tribunals have interpreted and applied the law correctly. Its acquaintance with the original facts is
usually several years old, and little more than hear-say.
When I first entered graduate study, very early in 1946, I witnessed
an excellent example of the problem. I
joined with other students, and groups, in a raucous protest of a meeting
held by an extreme right-wing, i.e. pro-German and anti-Jewish
organization. At the protest I joined
in lots of loud chanting and a dense marching line around the meeting site. I had arrived a bit late. Police were guarding the building
entry. Some windows there had been
broken before I arrived, but I saw no significant violence until late in the
evening. Then, a small group of
“street” youths broke through a police barrier and joined our protest line
around me. For a few minutes, I
answered their several questions as best I could. None of that seemed to have meaning for
them. Instead, they wanted to know why
we had not broken in where we could hear.
I pointed to several police guarding the entry. They obviously planned to attack. I withdrew to a spot from which I could
watch.
The attack came soon after, including blows with
fists and clubs, arrests, police vans, etc.
The meeting soon broke up.
There was some heckling and threatening as those attending and the
protesters dispersed, but no blows were struck that I could observe.
The next morning I learned from the newspaper that the man, Terminiello, who spoke was not the one that I had gone to protest,
but his aide. Later I learned from the
local head of the Jewish defense league that they, too, had been largely
unaware of what transpired inside. In
Terminiello v. Chicago, (1949) The Supreme Court of the United States
overturned Chicago’s ordinance under which Terminiello had been arrested for
inciting a riot. The Court held that
the ordinance was too broad, lacked specificity, and was therefore an
unconstitutional restriction upon speech.
I have no quarrel with that opinion regarding the law.
But, oh the facts! The Court in
its opinion showed no awareness that we on the outside did not know who spoke
or what he said. Apparently, the Court
was unaware that the violence was mainly by persons unrelated to either of
the major parties in the incident. Its
opinion implied that, with a slight change in the wording of the ordinance,
the conviction of the speaker would have been upheld.
The United States Supreme Court is a very poor institution for the
examination of factual, especially
transient, matters; it is well designed to maintain the substance and
consistency of our legal system. |
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Letter to the Editor, THE WALL
STREET JOURNAL,
11/15/1985: “Should U.S. Judges Court Voters?” Should I assume that
your suggestion (editorial, Oct. 30) that federal judges should be popularly
elected was merely hypothetical? Of
course judges should not have it both ways.
They should not be both tenured and politically active. But would popular election change that? The actual tenure of
members of the House in recent decades rivals that of judges, in spite of
members standing for election every two years. They have achieved tenure by voting
themselves huge staffs and funding for their individual communication uses. Furthermore, the House
is little, if any, more responsive to public majorities than the courts
are. Note more than thirty years of
Democratic dominance and an increasing gap between the totals of presidential
and congressional votes. Perhaps the best
defense of the liberal courts has been one made by Archibald
Cox and others, i.e., that the courts acted to solve problems which Congress
proved unable or unwilling to tackle. Neither that defense
nor Hamilton’s label as “the least danger branch” should divert us from
efforts to curb the power of the courts.
But recent liberalism of the courts has been in response to a wave of
opinion which dominated the mass media, the law schools, and the
bureaucracy. And none of those
institutions was politically important in Hamilton’s day. Let’s do reexamine
power and its distribution in American government. But election of judges and other
constitutional changes should await a broad public consensus regarding their
prudence and necessity. |
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Letter to the editor, THE DETROIT
NEWS, 7/8/03: Two
recent columns, Thomas Sowell’s 7/6 and Charles Krauthammer’s 7/7, offer
particularly enlightening comments on erosions of law and democracy in
America.
However, political and legal theories provide a more general
explanation. In Marxist theory legal
continuity (tradition) and objectivity are rejected as products of capitalism. The courts and laws are regarded as simply
other instruments by which a ruling class imposes its will upon society. (Text, in next two paragraphs, was deleted
before publication)
Thomas Sowell’s repetition of Justice Thomas’ reference to “the
know-it-all elites” is especially significant. America’s know-it-all elites are, or at
least seek to be, a new ruling class.
Given the revolution in mass communications, professional
communicators (academics and artists as well as journalists) are, arguably,
the most powerful minority in the United States. And, their “liberalism” is mostly an
egocentric illusion.
Erich Fromm in his BEYOND THE CHAINS OF ILLUSION identifies Marx’s key
idea: it is that to understand man, society, and politics one must cast off
all vestiges of capitalistic culture and morality. Those who do so, and only they, can escape
being blinded by illusions. Thus
anti-capitalists become the know-it-alls, and the potential liberators of
mankind.
Unfortunately, many of our most prestigious universities and law
schools are severely infected with at least that Marxist viewpoint. It is a view which intoxicates its followers
with the promise of power, and which has little respect for the continuity of
legal tradition or the values of popular majorities. Did
we lose the most subtle battle of the Cold War?- Ivan W. Parkins |
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DDT,
Malaria and Hasty Environmentalism Or how the ban on DDT has led to millions of malaria deaths. Why has
this not been reported? By Ivan W. Parkins THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL, May 23-24, 2009, in its lead editorial says,
“In 2006, after 25 years and 50 million, preventable deaths, the World Health
Organization reversed course and endorsed widespread use of the insecticide
DDT to combat malaria.” What! After a mere 50 million lives sacrificed to the ban on
DDT, it is withdrawn? World War II
cost all military involved an estimated 25 million lives, and civilian deaths
are estimated to have added 30 million more; it was a bigger killer than
malaria without DDT. Why have we been so poorly informed in this matter? Is it that 50 million, mostly poor African
children, count less than the three or so, terrorists that our security
people have water boarded?
Will the occasional deviations of our national defense
establishment from gentlemanly rules
of warfare really cause us greater international grief than our sacrifices to
environmentalism of millions of human
beings? Isn’t there something more
than a little skewed in our huge public information system? |
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Letter
to the Editor: THE MORNING SUN, May 20, 2009 Ban on DDT has led to malaria deaths. Linda
Gittleman in the front page story May 7, about DDT dangers, uses facts and
sources that are not, in my opinion, reliable. I would refer readers instead to Mark
Levin’s recent best-seller, “Liberty and Tyranny.”
Levin, pages 117-119, offers figures regarding increased deaths from
malaria based upon the National Academy of Science’s estimate of 500 million
deaths previously prevented by DDT, plus World Health Organization and
American Council on Science and Health’s more recent figures. Levin concludes that additional deaths
since the ban number in the millions. I
would add that, since even Gittleman’s 800,000 figure exceeds the total of
American combat fatalities in all wars of the 20th
and 21st centuries, it should be a warning against hasty
environmentalism. Ivan
Parkins |
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Letter to the Editor, THE MORNING SUN,
11/23/2003:
Anglo American legal tradition is based upon the idea that laws should
be enduring and impersonal. That is, a
free people should be able to plan their lives and to conduct their affairs
according to rules which are unlikely to change so frequently or so
arbitrarily as to upset their endeavors.
Marxism denies such a possibility—at least until after the
revolution. Law according to Marx, is
just another means by which the ruling class controls society. There is no such thing as impartial law.
Those two theories are an important part of what is at stake in the
U.S. Senate battle over confirmation of appellate court nominees. Our tradition is that a nominee who has
performed without obvious bias in lesser positions should qualify for an
appellate judgeship. Of course, people
are imperfect, and biases have never been totally absent from our courts. But our courts have been far different from
those of Russia, especially from theirs just after the Revolution. There, courts were expected to consider the
politics and financial resources of parties to a case. Should we go farther in that direction than
we have already?
Traditionally, our appellate courts are not supposed to have much
interest in how the parties to a case will be affected by their
decision. The primary job of appellate
courts is to assure that the laws are being properly interpreted and applied
by courts and officials below.
Appellate courts may remand the case for trial again, and, sometimes
with the original result.
Unfortunately, Congress fails in many instances to legislate in a
timely and clear manner. It is partly
because of such failures that appellate court nominations are so controversial. Some members of Congress are willing for
the appellate courts to “make” the law.
But, for that they must have judges with just the right political
leanings. -Ivan Parkins |
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MEMORIAL DAY-2009 WE HONOR THOSE WHO HAVE GIVEN THE
ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR OUR COUNTRY. |