Evidence of a Breakdown of Our Fundamental Rights Protection
By Shane Flait © 2010

 

Our Founding Fathers, fearful of a controlling government, arranged to make all government officials accountable, keep the branches of government separate, maintain the importance of a jury to protect litigants from bad laws and a usurping judiciary, and warned us not to trade away our freedom for any security the government offered in return.

 

This article shows how these concepts have broken down – especially with regard to fundamental rights protection for fathers under family court jurisdiction.    

 

1) Rights operationally traded away for security benefits:

During predominantly the latter half of the 20th century the people have allowed government to seduce them with government-promised benefits. Delivering them has permitted government to grow to unimaginable size, power, and control of every facet of our lives. Its octopus nature has put more than one out of five citizens directly in government employ with more seeking and getting special affiliation with some facet of government for its payments.

To sustain and grow its power, government has targeted select groups of citizens for specific privileges which are, of course, at the expense of nonselected groups. A host of affiliated agents, representatives, and the privileged citizen groups have become government-benefited special interest groups who lobby for more benefits at the expense of others groups not so well-connected.

These government-benefited special interest groups overwhelmingly influence - at taxpayers expense - the elected branches of government and through them control and influence the judicial branches. They seek their own betterment at the expense of others, and are able to suppress the securing of fundamental rights of others though their power and the incestuous relations between the different branches of government. Their dominance allows them to set the tone at all levels of society as more of the people must comply with contrived benefits and rules of government in their lives.

2) Deterioration of legal processes and loss of trials by jury

Indeed, powerful special interest groups – most especially, those funded and supported directly by the government - are able to push through laws injurious to the fundamental rights of nonfavored classes of people. Abuse Laws are an example which requires no wrong doing yet deprives men of all their rights and sets them up for criminal prosecution for never a real criminal act “just pretended offenses” - as mentioned in the Declaration of Independence.

Juries are not at all informed of their right to judge the law as well as the facts during a trial – a key protection against bad laws by our founding fathers. Juries are excluded in family court where the greatest transfer of wealth occurs and sets the stage for enormous violation of due process and fundamental rights against fathers.

Enormous loss of privacy and the rights this implies occur in family court as well as by phony emergencies such as perennial war and the ‘need to know’ by government. Rampant plea bargaining - a form of present day torture or coercion in criminal and civil cases - forces innocents to fear the excessive penalty possibilities of an unjust trial; so they cop a plea. The Salem witch trials atmosphere is back in our court system in more ways than ever.

Criminal penalties –like incarceration - are imposed without the required due process for civil contempt as well as criminal contempt. The Writ of habeous corpus has in large part been lost in federal court bureaucracy. Defendants can get up to six months in jail without a trial and certainly without a trial by jury.

3) The accountability of state officials – especially in the legal areas is almost nonexistent. Judges have created absolute immunity for themselves no matter what their offense while adjudicating a case. Aids to the court and lawyers are very well protected so almost any perfidy can take place by them leaving no redress of any impact operationally possible.

4) Separation of branches of government:

Complete breakdown of the envisioned separation of government branches has caused tyrannical control of court by special interest groups – as most evident in divorce suits.

Family court initiates the extortion of money from fathers illegally deprived of their children under the rubric ‘child support’. However, assigning this support collection to the State’s Department of Revenue (DOR) helps increase DOR’s coffers through assisting federal funds. The DOR in turn pays money directly to the very family court system that unjustly denied the father his children so as to extort money from him. This violates the intent of separation of branches.

Ironically it is the perversion of equal rights legislation of the 1960’s -to create new phony rights –like affirmative action, harassment, and abuse laws for favored group rights that has created the engine and interest groups that have undermined the protection of fundamental rights for all.