Some people have asked whether there is some legal means to readjust government and hold politicians accountable. There was once upon a time the legal right of Quo Warranto. This is a Latin phrase meaning “By what authority”. It sounds very nice; I even wrote a motion to demand by what authority does a judge have to hold someone in civil contempt for life without lawyers, trial, or charges. The Court of Appeals Judge, John Walker Jr. (Bush’s cousin) effectively claimed that historically the judge was the same as the king, declaring their power was inherent, and Congress could not overrule that. Congress can only suggest, for Walker effectively wrote that judges refuse to give up such power as they are above the Constitution. Even the Circuit Judge Sonia Sotomayor (now Supreme Court Justice) wrote in my case that there should still be some due process, but judges are not confined by Congress (1) – so much for Democracy.
Any attempt to use Quo Warranto to demand that those in power show their authority to do what they do – well good luck. They appoint the judges and they will NEVER surrender the power of themselves or government. I do not see this as a viable solution. Sure, I could write the brief, but that would be a waste of time.
We do not live in a Democracy for we would have the right to vote on everything. We live in a Republic with people pretending to be representing us who are there forever and thus exempt themselves from the law. They even select the people to be judges. The system is entire corrupt and rotten to the core. This is why the Roman Republic led to civil war and in the end, an emperor emerged because the Roman Senate could no longer be trusted.
So yes the writ of Quo Warranto is technically still there since we adopted the common law of England. The likelihood of it even being heard is up there with someone really honest becoming president.
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(1) “I write separately to articulate my belief that the eighteen-month maximum duration imposed on a civil contempt sanction by the Recalcitrant Witness Statute should be a presumptive benchmark for all civil contempt incarcerations. A sanction lasting more than four times the congressional benchmark for such punishments is so extreme that, as Judge Walker rightly directs, the district court should undertake soon to revisit whether Armstrong’s imprisonment has slipped into the impermissible terrain of a punitive sanction. The Supreme Court has made clear that “[d]ue process requires that the nature and duration of commitment bear some reasonable relation to the purpose for which the individual is committed.” In the context of civil contempt, the Supreme Court has also made clear that, at some point, an imprisoned contemnor must be released… This Court has joined the Third Circuit in holding that the Recalcitrant Witness statute’s eighteen-month limit on incarceration for civil contempt represents Congress’s carefully-considered attempt to find the line between coercive and punitive detention. … It has not been suggested that Congress’s resolution of the problem is unreasonable, and it would therefore appear to be inappropriate for the judiciary to substitute its judgment for that of the legislative body by undertaking as a routine matter to draw finer lines than Congress has already drawn between coercive and punitive periods of confinement. … We held “that in the absence of unusual circumstances,” it would be inappropriate for a reviewing court “to conclude, as a matter of due process, that a civil contempt sanction has lost its coercive impact at some point prior to the eighteen-month period prescribed as a maximum by Congress.” Id. This due process presumption should work in the opposite direction, as well: Except in unusual circumstances, a civil contempt sanction longer than eighteen months should be presumed to be punitive. … When officers of government violate the law, exceed the authority provided through the Constitution or fail to follow their primary responsibilities to the people, it falls to the people to hold those officers accountable. However, the people generally seem to have no idea how they can possibly accomplish that necessary task to keep government operating within the limitations prescribed by the Constitution.“
