This article is part 3 in an investigative series looking into court corruption in Montana. For the rest of the investigation, visit the full catalog.
The Constitution is not a difficult document to read or understand. The powers of the branches of government are well defined. Article III lays out what the Judiciary is supposed to do in the United States.
The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour, and shall, at stated Times, receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office.
It’s interesting that it says “shall hold their Offices during good Behaviour,” which should be obvious but isn’t when judges all over the country are violating ethics obligations and standards of behavior with no consequences whatsoever. Section 2 addresses which courts have jurisdiction and spells out that crimes will be tried in front of juries. Section 3 defines treason and specifies that Congress has the right to attach a punishment to the crime of treason. That’s it. That’s all there is on the judiciary in our Constitution. The rest of the Constitution spells out all the things your branches of government are not allowed to do to you. But where the branches of government are concerned, there are very specific powers granted to each.
The 10th Amendment says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It’s important to understand that “the people” are the legislatures. The people are not represented by judges but by their elected representatives. So the 10th Amendment is specifying more power to the state legislatures to make decisions in their state about things that are not specified in the Constitution. There is no amendment that gives judges any more powers than what is already laid out in Article III.
For instance, the judiciary does not have any power to create or vote on legislation. They only have one function: to adjudicate cases before them in a non-biased, impartial way. Sometimes they apply the law in criminal cases, and sometimes in civil. Sometimes they decide if a law that the legislature has passed is constitutional or not, but that is as close as the judiciary is ever supposed to get to making law. They literally can’t make laws. They can decide whether laws measure up to our founding documents, but they are to have no part in making those laws.
So imagine my shock when it was pointed out to me that the Supreme Court justices of all fifty states have created their own legislature, a fraudulent Congress called the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ), where they go twice a year and vote on “resolutions” that they then take back to their respective states and implement through court procedures. These resolutions have a destructive impact on the residents of their states and the litigants in their courts, and they undermine the will of the people by usurping the job of the legislature. Here’s an example where the CCJ resolved to lobby against an amendment that would protect U.S. service members from unfair family court practices that are biased against service members because they are often deployed and can’t come in person to court hearings. The CCJ judges don’t want the federal government telling them they have to be fairer to service members.
Did you know that Supreme Court Justices from all 50 states have set up their own legislative body that meets twice a year to create and vote on "resolutions" that seek to interfere in the legislative process and thwart the will of the people? Here's some judicial meddling. pic.twitter.com/MzASdk1ITb
— No, not THAT Megan Fox 🦊 (@MeganFoxWriter) January 12, 2022
I searched and searched through the Constitution but I did not find any permissions for judges to create a federal legislative body. It doesn’t exist, and yet, the CCJ does exist. And the website is full of their “resolutions.” These are pseudo laws some flunkie (whom we are probably paying for) typed up. And who pays for the twice-a-year junket to go to the fake congress and sit around pretending to be legislators? I BET WE DO! I couldn’t find information on where these conferences are held. Frankly, I’m surprised they haven’t built themselves a fake Capitol somewhere in D.C. where they take their fake votes on fake resolutions that have absolutely no power or authority. I’d love to see this on television, especially if they were wearing fake wigs while tallying their fake votes.
Then there are the offshoot organizations like the National Center for State Courts where they “establish” policies like stymying landlords with “Eviction and Diversity Initiatives” that keep landlords from being able to evict deadbeat tenants. How is this happening outside the legislatures? These people in the video below are dressed up like founding fathers of all things and going on about how they received huge grants to hand out to “court facilitators” to do “a myriad of different things,” from “docket management to developing legal information to thinking about how to implement all the best practices we’ve learned about how eviction diversion and eviction dockets can be structured.” What the fresh hell is this? Someone gave them $11.5 MILLION for this (and it was probably U.S. taxpayers). Is that something you wanted? How did they get these grants? Who is giving the Bar Association members so many millions of dollars to hand out to their friends? A perusal of their website did not divulge the source of the grants.
This guy, Shawn Jurgensen, whom the CCJ recommends court professionals watch, says he works for the chief justice in Kansas and is the “special counsel for legislative affairs.” In the linked video he is hosting a webinar for other court professionals to show them how to get loads of money from the government. Why is there a special counsel for legislative affairs working with any member of the judiciary? According to his job description, he’s there to spy on the legislature and meddle in a process judges aren’t supposed to be meddling in.
As special counsel, Jurgensen’s responsibilities will include serving as liaison for the chief justice, the Supreme Court, and the judicial branch in matters before the Kansas Legislature. This includes monitoring bills and arranging for subject matter expert testimony, making sure courts are informed when bills pass that change how cases are processed, and answering legislator inquiries.
What would happen if the legislature hired lawyers to spy on judges? I can tell you that in Missouri, when legislators themselves try and just observe a family court case, they are told to hit the road, don’t come back, YOU’RE NOT WELCOME. So why on earth are the legislatures allowing court spies in their houses? Something is very, very wrong with the way the judiciary is working. They’ve completely overstepped their authority and scope. And no one in the legislatures in this country appears to even notice. Are our lawmakers aware that the judiciary has no business lobbying for or against bills that positively or negatively affect them like the Montana Supreme Court was caught doing? Why is this allowed? It’s clear that the American judiciary is deeply embedded all over the legislatures in every state lobbying to get more power for themselves. What happened to the “separation of powers?”
A law professor reached out to blow the whistle on judicial collusion and overstepping. He did not want to be named because the retaliation against lawyers is vicious since the judiciaries control the oversight of lawyers (another glaring conflict of interest). For the interest of this article, I’ll call him Professor Smith. “The judiciary has the American Bar Association at their beck and call all day long,” said Smith. “They’re strategizing how to get more power, more control all the time on a national level. They go to meetings twice a year and they talk about how to get more control. They have control over the lawyers too. How do you restrict the free speech of lawyers? You call it ‘anti-discrimination.'”
This “anti-discrimination” policy was one of the fake resolutions passed by another fake congress, the American Bar Association, which is based out of Chicago. Like the CCJ, the ABA has its own legislative body that they laughingly call the “House of Delegates” and they pass “resolutions” that make their way into every state judiciary. But not in Montana. The legislature stopped it, showing where the real power lies. The ABA’s rule that was so offensive to the state of Montana was Rule 8.4, which attempted to regulate attorneys’ behavior in such a nebulous way that it was sure to allow anyone to be disciplined for anything, stating it would be misconduct to “engage in conduct that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know is harassment or discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status or socioeconomic status in conduct related to the practice of law.” These days, everyone is so offended by everything that a rule like that is unworkable and most likely just put there to further tighten the choke collar around the necks of attorneys who might speak out about the rampant court corruption.
The ABA reported on the legislature’s decision to tell them to go pound sand in Montana back in 2017.
The resolution says public comment was overwhelmingly opposed, but the court “relentlessly pursues adoption” of the rule by extending the time to consider it. This, the legislature said, overreaches the high court’s authority to regulate the conduct of attorneys—it says “the word ‘conduct’ clearly does not include the concept of ‘speech’”—and usurps the legislature’s power to make laws.
“Contrary to the ABA’s world view, there is no need in a free civil society, such as exists in Montana, for the cultural shift forced by the proposed rule, and even if such a need did exist, the Supreme Court has no constitutional power to enact legislation of any sort, particularly legislation forcing cultural shift,” the resolution says.
Professor Smith says the action by the legislature was a clear sign to the judiciary that they would not get away with limiting free speech, and the judiciary immediately stopped trying to implement the rule. “The most important thing is to let legislators know that they have this power. They have to start protecting the people,” said Smith. “They have to start enacting impeachment laws against the judges.”
Oversight is a serious problem, one that Montana judges successfully lobbied against recently and got caught doing it. “You guys in the legislature have to look over every single case judges do and when you determine it was an unconstitutional decision, you have to overturn it and then get rid of the judge that did it,” said Smith.
Smith says it’s tempting to blame the judiciary, but it’s the legislators who are the real problem. “I studied this long enough and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the weak, non-reactive legislators who are the problem. It’s like when your washing machine starts going off the track and you hear that big BOOM, BOOM, you go down and you fix it, right?” he said. “If given the chance, the judiciary will go rogue and the legislature has to be the ones to fix it and they don’t. Legislators have been silent for years. And now there are new guys in there who have no idea what power they have and what they can do,” said Smith.
Smith says there’s hope. “It’s an easy fix. You get state control over the judiciary through the legislature. And you start by passing laws that say that the organizations like the ABA and the CCJ are not allowed to meddle in your state. All rules and laws that govern state courts and lawyers should go through the legislatures.”
It seems simple, but it requires lawmakers who not only recognize that the judiciary is taking over the legislative process but who also have the will to do something about it.
