Since last Thursday, all we have been hearing is that Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor likes her colleague Justice Clarence Thomas, almost to the exclusion of the other members of the Court.  But what if Sotomayor's statement of affection for Justice Thomas was not the part of her speech that was meant to be heard around the world?  What if there was another part of Sotomayor's statement that was the real message for fellow travelers everywhere?

At the very beginning of this clip, Justice Sotomayor describes the people of the United States as the "fourth branch of government."  Specifically, she says, "You are as equal, if not the fourth branch, of government[.]"  She just relegated We The People to fourth-class bureaucratic standing.  Thirty seconds later, she doubled down: "And remember, I created the people as the fourth now."

A Supreme Court justice denigrating the Constitution should be of greater concern than her feelings about another justice!  That should be the headline!

God has given us great gifts, including our free will to "work out [our] own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).  Our Constitution acknowledges at the level of government what the Almighty Creator set in place for each individual: free will, used rightly.  And so, under God, we the people are the self-governing government.

Up until a few years ago, everyone knew that the Constitution was designed to provide a government that was structurally constituted to respect its citizens' free will.  If not by fourth-grade civics, then by high school American History, we all knew that we are not some arbitrarily created fourth branch of government.  We the people grant the federal government its powers.  The very Preamble of the Constitution states, "We The People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union ... do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

Unfortunately, as noted by the late SUNY-Buffalo professor of political science, Richard H. Cox, the Preamble has been shunted away from judicial consideration.  Specifically, at page 22, Cox stated that enough Article III judges and constitutional law "scholars," such as Laurence Tribe, accrued the power to create a rather incestuous interpretation of American law that relied heavily upon the personal philosophies of certain judges and forsook such consequential words as the Preamble of the Constitution.

The three (count them, three) branches of the federal government "can only act to effectuate the powers specifically granted to it [by the people], rather than acting for the general welfare of the populace."  This quotation is from the Hornbook Series on Constitutional Law, 3rd edition, Nowak, Rotunda, and Young, at page 111, section 3.1.  This book should reside, well worn, on the desktop of every justice.  Cannot Justice Sotomayor afford to buy herself a copy of this book, given her $274,200 base salary?

Given that the true headline is that Sotomayor trashed the Constitution in public and thereby devalued the power inherent in the American people, we are now left to query whether her statement was a dog-whistle to the like-minded.  Perhaps it was a token of evidence of Sotomayor's gratitude — and servitude — to big players who supplement her income well?

It helps to know that Sotomayor succeeded Sandra Day O'Connor as the judicial spokesperson for iCivics, an interactive computer program for teaching schoolchildren civics based on "primary documents" specially selected by a fabulous array of scholars underwritten by the likes of the Gates Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and others.  Is Sotomayor a mere shill for an ignoble elite who wish to accrete more power to themselves?

Image: Sonia Sotomayor.  YouTube screen grab.

As we were warned by Beverly K. Eakman in Cloning of the American Mind, major donors love to foist deleterious propaganda on our children by way of "free" and attractive underwritten curricula.

Fortunately, we are entering the second generation of the postmodern American homeschooling movement.  Now we have other resources for our children's civics lessons, such as books by Anne W. Carroll, the Catholic Schools Textbook Project, the Notgrass American history books, and myriad videos by David Barton and Kirk Cameron.  These sources make for good reading and viewing for adults as well!

An encroachment upon our liberties was gestated by (if not conceived in) the devolution of our "liberal" education and the egoism of law professors, many of whom were judges.  Certainly, there are Marxists and other outside influencers who just want to take our country down a peg.

Where does this place Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor?  After all, Barack Obama, the American president who said there is nothing particularly special about our country, appointed her to the bench.  Does Sotomayor desire to destroy our Constitution, even though she swore to uphold it?

To folks here in flyover country, the Sotomayor scenario looks like a bigger headache for Chief Justice John Roberts than a leaked draft of a Court opinion (as calamitous as that is).  Appointed for life by our chief executive and approved by our Senate, Justice Sonia Sotomayor is either an idiot with respect to basic civics or a dangerous sellout.  Whichever the case, she is one of the nine members on the Supreme Court, the court of last resort.

Marianna Trzeciak, B.A., Princeton, J.D., Rutgers-Camden, has enjoyed homeschooling her children K through 12.