The previous year I had written the below proposed guest editorial after an exchange with Prof. Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of Minnesota School of Law. He sent me some material he had written on the subject. My question to Prof. George anticipated the response I got based on Prof. Paulsen's work. Prof. George has done some similar work. My editorial was never published.

As Chief Executive, George W. Bush has both an obligation and all necessary authority to end this nation's twenty-nine year abortion bloodbath by shutting down the nation's abortion mills, seizing their equipment and, if necessary, revoking the medical licenses of any medi-whores who persist in prostituting their medical skills to destroy human lives.

Many will react with shock to this idea. They have been carefully conditioned to believe that the judiciary has the final say in interpreting the Constitution or is even the supreme branch of government. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The myth of judicial supremacy has been successfully perpetrated only recently by those who cannot get their often outrageous agendas (such as abortion-on-demand) past any elected body accountable to the people. The prevalence of such persons in the left-leaning national media and academia, who preach the lie over and over, is largely responsible for the current unthinking acceptance of judicial supremacy.

There is nothing in the Constitution to even suggest that the judiciary is the supreme or final arbiter of what the law is. The Constitution doesn't even define the "judicial Power," so confident were the framers that it was not dangerous, possessing neither "the purse nor the sword." These belonged to the legislative and executive branches, respectively.

The Supreme Court's original 1803 assertion of the power of judicial review in *Marbury v. Madison* never claimed judicial supremacy or exclusivity of judgment. Judicial review was simply implied because "(t)hose who apply the rule to particular cases, must of necessity expound and interpret that rule." But this is equally true of the executive branch, if not more so, since the executive also applies the laws and even the judgments of the judiciary.

Both the president and Supreme Court justices takes oaths of office to support the Constitution. Both the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments say that no "person" may be deprived of life without due process of law. These amendments demand that the president fulfill his oath by stopping those who would destroy the lives of persons.

There is much precedent for this "executive review." Among others, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln sometimes ignored the Supreme Court's rulings. Jackson reputedly said: "Mr. (Chief Justice John) Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." Jackson understood that the Court's decisions were not binding on the executive branch. This was the original understanding of the Constitution's framers who saw separation of powers as dependent upon co-equal, coordinate (not *sub*ordinate) branches of government. To them, the supremacy of any one branch was the essence of despotism. The writings of framers like Madison and Hamilton as well as Jefferson and others are consistent on this point.

In *Roe v. Wade*, the Supreme Court said: "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer." Note the twin ludicrous assertions: that because the Court supposedly can not answer a key question the question is irrelevant, and the existence of life before birth is somehow a question of philosophy or theology rather than of biology, the science of life. By thus confusing the issue, the Court side-stepped the question and proceeded, in spite of its admitted (though feigned) ignorance, as though prenatal lives did not exist and therefore did not qualify as "persons" under the Constitution. With this obvious nonsense, the Court evaded acknowledging that what they were really striking down was the philosophical premise of our nation -- that human rights are intrinsic with human lives -- a premise described in the Declaration of Independence as a truth we hold self-evident. They turned back the clock to when human rights were granted or denied by the powerful based on criteria of their choice, and gave us a nation based on might makes right, the philosophy of all oppression.

Historically, the legal removal of some target population from the protected class of "persons" has been a key step toward so many abuses that United Nations documents typically speak of "everyone" ("tout le monde" - literally "all the world" - in the original French) to avoid any such dangerous distinctions. It was precisely this distinction that the Supreme Court made in *Roe v. Wade* by a transparent act of subterfuge. A decision so completely lacking in truth, justice, knowledge, reason and principle deserves to be simply ignored.

In a more recent example of the "personhood" mind game, Americans were appalled by the pious pronouncements of Osama bin Laden, who treated the lives of our people as having no significance. But our own Osamas are legion. They can mouth platitudes about human rights and freedoms while ignoring or even defending the daily live dismemberment of thousands of prenatal children. Like bin Laden (or the Supreme Court), they have accomplished the "mental abortion" of separating a target population into some subhuman category of non-persons such that anything can be done to it. Just listen to them. They speak of "potential" life versus children "already here" as though lives before birth do not exist. The "mental abortion" can be done on the basis of prenatal developmental characteristics, race, religion, social class, language group or other criteria, but its ultimate result is just as deadly.

Unrestricted legal abortion has been a cultural disaster and particularly devastating to women who know instinctively and from experience what abortion is and does. The consequences of our legally enshrined disrespect for life continue to unfold in new nightmares like cloning. It will not stop until the killing of our most innocent and helpless persons is ended.

Waiting for a test case after a hoped for change in the Supreme Court's composition makes a mockery of the pro-life cause. Left-wing Senators are already scheming to further corrupt the judiciary by assuring the confirmation of only more dictatorial jurists, knowing that the "fundamental right" contrived in *Roe v. Wade* hangs by a thread. The President should pre-empt them by restoring our nation's moral health on his own authority. His access to the "bully pulpit" will be critical to exposing decades of disinformation dispensed by the well-funded abortion lobby, as well as the myth of judicial supremacy.