Quote of the Day - Jerry Pournelle Edition

The liberties of the American people are entrusted to the whole of the people. Courts can delay, courts can warn, or, as with the Warren Court, they can be something to fear. But liberty must be won continually; it is not something you can win once and go back to sleep. As we are finding more and more.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free. And eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Those clichés were once more than clichés and slogans; they were learned in the cradle and nurtured in grade school. We have forgotten them, and for some they are corny old clichés. They are not. They are the axioms of liberty. -- Jerry Pournelle, Chaos Manor

UPDATE: Another one from Jerry from an earlier post:

What Mr. Roberts has seen is that a law so badly framed that it has internal contradictions and which mandates colossal new taxes while handing over nearly 20% of the national economy to federal bureaucrats has passed the House and Senate and has been signed by a President who purports to be an expert on Constitutional Law by dint of having been a lecturer on the subject at the University of Chicago as well as the President of the Harvard Law Review; and despite the obvious defects of this law, four Justices were eager to approve it. The whole course of the United States turns on the survival of five men. If one of them goes, so does the Constitution.

The old model of Congress messing with the Constitution and the Court trying to save it no longer works. We have gone too far down the road to serfdom, and if we continue there will be no turning back. The Courts cannot perpetually resist the political departments. If the Constitutionalists among us cannot regain control of the political branches, what we know as the Constitution of 1789 will be gone, irretrievably gone; it takes only one more liberal Justice.

Whereupon Mr. Roberts has thrown this question to the people. Is this the way you want to go? If so, confirm those who posed it. If not, turn them out. You have one more election to accomplish this. If Mr. Obama has four more years, the chances are good that he will be able to add one more to the Court, and there will be no turning back.