in World News The Imperial Judiciary Of The United States
By Vince Coyner
“Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s…”
When Jesus was alive, the religious leader of Rome was, in fact, both Caesar and the voice of God, for Emperor Augustus had taken the position of Pontifex Maximus, the chief high priest, for himself.
A separation between church and state would occur in the late 4th century when Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, would cleave the two.
In 390 AD, in Thessalonica, a Macedonian city in the Roman Empire, the citizens murdered a Roman garrison commander for arresting the most popular Macedonian charioteer just before a major race. A seething Emperor Theodosius ordered his soldiers to slaughter the entire population. When the smoke cleared, 7,000 men, women, and children died in the Massacre of Thessalonica.
Ambrose, the most powerful man in Christianity at the time, banned the emperor from Mass. Theodosius I, an extremely devout man, would spend the next six months seeking Ambrose’s forgiveness and doing penance. Eventually, Ambrose decided the Emperor had shown sufficient contrition and allowed him back into the Church, but not before forcing him to make Christianity the official religion of the Empire and outlawing every other faith.
That was one of the first and most powerful checks on a monarch’s power in the history of Western civilization. Another would come in 1215 when English King John was forced by a group of rebellious barons to sign the Magna Carta, which provided protections for the church and guaranteed the barons a variety of liberties and rights.
Fast forward 562 years and another step towards a truly limited government would occur in Philadelphia in 1787. In an unprecedented advance for Western civilization and, frankly, humanity, the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution of the United States. With a keen understanding of man’s nature, this document was sufficiently robust and prescient that it would last for centuries.
In a direct reaction to the English system, they wrote a constitution in which, while the primary power lay in the legislature, the power of all three branches was checked by the other two and ultimately by the citizens and the Bill of Rights.
To give some perspective on where the locus of power lay in the new constitution, compare the articles that define the powers of the three branches: Article I, the Legislature, has 2,268 words. Article II, the Executive, has 1,025 words, while Article III, the Judiciary, has a mere 377.
The Founding Fathers went to great lengths to divide the powers and put in place checks and balances so that mob rule and demagogues would not take hold of the government and bring about tyranny.
One of those checks was the Judicial Branch: