Judge Moore and the Rule of Law
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The New York Times and the Importance of Proof Reading and Fact Checking
The New York Times editorializes today on Alabama State Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who has yet to comply with a federal district court order to remove the monument to the Ten Commandments that Moore had placed in the Alabama Supreme Court’s courthouse:
- The federal Constitution applies to the states, and the federal courts are its ultimate interpreter. Justice Moore’s desire to ignore the Constitution’s mandates on the separation of church and state has an uncomfortable resemblance to the arguments Gov. George Wallace made when he mounted his stand in the “schoolhouse door” to block blacks from enrolling at the University of Alabama.
Two very quick comments:
- –The New York Times is right. Judge Moore should comply with the federal tiral court’s order. To do otherwise, is to substitute his own judgment for the rule of law. If Judge Moore disagrees, he can and should appeal, but it is particularly pernicious for a high state court judge to substitute his private judgmeent for orderly legal process.
–But who allowed the statement “the federal courts are its ultimate interpreter” to get into print. The United States Supreme Court is the ultimate interpreter of the United States Consititution, but lower federal courts and state courts are equally competent to interpret the United States Constitution. A federal trial court judge or federal appellate panel may not hear appeals from decisions of federal law in state court. (This is the arcane Rooker-Feldman doctrine.) It is true that Judge Moore is bound by the federal trial court injunction in the Ten Commandments monument case, but that is because he is a defendant (or the agent thereof). If the Alabama case had been filed in state rather than federal court, then the lower federal courts would (barring something very unusual) have no jurisdiction to consider whether the Alabama courts were correct on issues of federal law. Finally, in the quoted snipped there is a grammar problem: “courts” is plural and “interpreter” is singular.
And speaking of errors by the New York Times editorial page, check out this post by Eric Muller. Am I imagining things or are elite media outlets becoming progressively more sloppy? (Oh, and by the way, I certainly do not do as well as the New York Times when it comes to typos.)