Of Real ID, The Living-Dead Amnesty Bill, and Family Court Atrocities

Written by Stephen Yates

Jun 20, 2007 at 12:00 AM

Sometimes the weekly task of writing this column is daunting—not because of a lack of topics but rather too many. This past weekend, at least four were banging around in my head begging to be let out. The past two weeks have been weeks of highs and lows. The highs were very high. The lows were—shall we say—low. I could begin with what my title calls the “living-dead” amnesty bill—S.1348, the Teddy Kennedy / John McCain / Lindsey Graham amnesty-for-illegal-aliens package being passed off as “immigration reform.” Were this column exclusively about that, I would have entitled it, “The Night of the Living Dead Amnesty Bill.” Like the zombies in the grainy George Romero horror classic, amnesty-for-illegals has shambled back to a semblance of life; its backers refuse to let it die despite the clear message to Congress and to the White House that the majority of Americans want to stop the colonization of our country. President Bush has paid personal visits to Republicans who voted against the bill, working on them to change their votes after a resounding defeat two weeks ago. “I’ll see you at the bill signing,” he said, a sentence which speaks volumes about the arrogance of power in Rome on the Potomac. The globalists, of course, want this bill in the worst way. They want the colonization to continue for several reasons. First, former illegals placed on a path to citizenship will reward American politicians with votes—which, given the mindset of La Raza and other Mexican nationalist movements (backed by Ford and Rockefeller Foundation money), will mean America’s sinking deeper into multiculturalism as Mexicans remain more loyal to their own than to their adopted home, which will widen already existing cultural divides. This will further dilute our founding traditions and philosophy. Second, the abundance of former illegals in the workplace will keep wages low. This will further erode our middle class and bring us closer to the third world conditions already evident in many large urban areas, especially out West but spreading rapidly. These factors will work together to weaken American identity and prepare America for the planned merger with Mexico and Canada. Moreover, the situation we are in may continue to make national ID seem attractive to many people, including employers. National ID, we will be told, will tell us definitively who is in this country, where they are, and what they are doing. Immigration control has been one of the reasons proffered in defense of the Real ID Act. We South Carolinians won a battle against Real ID last week—as I’ve written elsewhere. Governor Mark Sanford publicly signed S.449, South Carolina’s declaration that we will not participate in the federal Real ID Act. We joined the state-led rebellion that began in Maine. Shaking the Governor’s hand—twice—and being photographed next to him: definitely a high point of recent weeks. But we have to realize that although we’ve won a battle, the war is far from over. I am convinced that one of the reasons our elites want S.1348 so badly is because of its Employment Eligibility Verification System which lays down rules of a national identification system that are as stringent as anything in the Real ID Act—without coming right out and saying so, these rules would effectively reanimate Real ID despite repudiation by the states. This is all the more reason why S.1348 needs to be killed once and for all. Those of us who faxed, emailed, or made phone calls to our Senators have no alternative except to keep up the pressure. These occasional victories against power are sometimes offset by the realization of how much work has to be done, in areas both visible and less so, if we are to reverse our course towards a society whose only law is that of brute force, with force applied for no other reason than that its appliers can get away with it—and regardless of whether what they are doing even makes sense. Take family court, for example—where two people I know very well are fighting for personal survival (in one case, possibly for her life!). You never have a lower moment than observing someone you care about being hauled off to jail, unjustly—her rights under the Constitution having been flagrantly violated—and there’s not a thing you can do to stop it because you know that if you interfere, you’ll be arrested. This is the situation with family court’s efforts to enforce child support payments against those who are indigent—literally penniless in some cases, whether because they have lost their jobs or, in the case close at hand, because the person is suffering from a chronic illness, cannot work, but has not yet been granted disability. I have no problem with court-ordered child support payments. I do have a problem with the practice—which appears to be standard practice in Greenville County—of putting both men and women in jail for nonpayment when they are unable to pay (and yes, women are affected by these abuses no less than men). If there is willful neglect of one’s responsibilities, so that the person clearly is defying a court order, then I say, Go ahead, put him/her in jail. But I cannot see the rationality, much less the justice, in putting someone in jail who is physically not able to pay. Common horse sense dictates that the person is not going to be able to earn money locked up; and yet the demands of the court continue to add up. What we have here is nothing more than a debtors’ prison. Debtors’ prisons are forbidden by the Constitution. But when government abandons its Constitution on its way to empire, a sort of meanness or malicious indifference sets in. It permeates less visible, lower-echelon courts, such as family courts. I personally witnessed violations of the Constitution last Wednesday. My friend was never advised of her Sixth Amendment right to legal counsel. She was then persecuted—not prosecuted—by a judge who, without due process, completely ignored a legal brief and notarized affidavit she had properly filed with the court the afternoon before. Now of course, there is no reason to believe my friend was targeted personally. This was happening to every man and woman who went through two courtrooms where child support cases were being heard—or, at least, to those who could not afford lawyers! I have no reason to believe any of them were advised of their right to legal counsel, or advised that they could ask for court-appointed counsel to advise them of their rights.   On top of that, court costs were assessed to my friend of $150 on top of the child support she could not pay! This for a “hearing” lasting all of three minutes! I saw nothing during those three minutes that a rational person would assess as worth $150! Nevertheless, the court ordered: pay the child support plus the court cost, or stay in jail 120 days. That’s life for the destitute in an empire, and illustrates its primary method: brute, unreasoned force. And legal thievery on a grand scale. For given the time frame, if an average of 20 defendants is shuffled through a single courtroom in an hour and each one is charged $150 for a three-minute hearing, do the math: that’s $3,000 per hour!! If family court hears two hours of such cases in two courtrooms, that’s $12,000 in a single morning, which is more than I earn from teaching in six months!! Only half that many cases would still be $6,000 in one morning! Does the word racket ring a bell? How about obscene (despicable doesn’t seem to cut it). My friend, whom I drove to court last Wednesday morning because her own car’s brakes are out and she cannot afford to get them fixed, has medical problems that could leave her permanently disabled or worse (she has no health insurance). Nobody really thinks she is going to get decent medical attention in Greenville County Detention Center, where an incarcerated man died unnecessarily of a heart attack some time ago because he needed immediate medical attention and did not receive it. (Believe it or not, inmates are human beings, not animals; many people have been incarcerated in this society for nonviolent offenses such as failure to pay child support—sometimes alongside gang members, murderers and rapists. What would I do with these child support cases? Require community service, where money could be earned and used both to make the payments and eventually get the person back on her feet. Have I mentioned that our empire has the highest per capita incarceration rate of any supposedly advanced society in the world?) There are doubtless several object lessons here. One is educational: in today’s system, if you do not know your righte, for all practical purposes you have none—and even then, today there are no guarantees they will be respected. After all, abuses of citizens in police custody, including the use of tasers capable of delivering a potentially deadly 40,000 volts, are becoming so common that they are barely news anymore. But today’s government schools are graduating millions of young people trained to be sheeple, who will not know their rights because the schools barely mention our founding documents and say little about our Founding Fathers except to point out that they owned slaves. Some of these people graduate from law schools using exclusively the case law method in which they learn only judges’ decisions and never get to foundational questions. Then they become judges themselves, and set up fiefdoms that most people don’t even know exist unless it affects them. Yes, we may have won a recent battle against the potentially tyrannical Real ID Act. We may yet stop the insidious, globalist-backed “immigration reform” bill. But we clearly have much, much more to do if we are ever to be a society that is deserving of being called free and humane—a republic, if by some chance we can figure out how to keep it. --------------------------------------- Steven Yates teaches philosophy at the University of South Carolina Upstate and Greenville Technical College, and is on the board of the South Carolina chapter of Citizens Committee to Stop the FTAA. The views expressed in his columns are his own, and do not reflect official views of any of these institutions or organizations. His latest book World-views: Christian Theism versus Modern Materialism, was published last year by The Worldviews Project (for more information call 864-288-0043). He is at work on a new book tentatively entitled The Real Matrix. His email address is: