America's Judicial System - Born out of Oppression

American Injustice - Image1.gif

America's Judicial System - Born out of Oppression

Beware the Wolves
In America, our memories fade too soon. By the time of the Constitution, our countrymen had already endured a hundred years of harsh domination by the East India Company, a corporation chartered by the King of England in 1600 to carry on the business of the throne.

East India Company maintained its own army, conducted its private wars around the world, exploited the helpless masses of India, and eventually opened up China for the opium trade. For more than one hundred years before the Declaration of Independence, the Hudson's Bay Company, still another corporation, had exploited the Indians and the furred animals of this continent to near extinction.

It was, of course, the East India Company's forcing of cheap, government-subsidized tea on the colonists that prompted the Boston Tea Party, a prelude to the American Revolution. Early in our history, our Founding Fathers rejected the corporate form as another of the king's tools for enslavement, casting it out with the remaining trappings of tyranny in favor of the simple rights of man.

The English King, as a constituent part of the supreme legislative power, once had the absolute prerogative of rejecting any measure passed by the two Houses of Parliament; the royal assent was an integral and indispensable part of the legislative process, which, in theory at least, could not be overcome by any further legislative action by the two Houses of Parliament other than that of reaching an accommodation with the King. I Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, ch. II, p. 177; ch. VII, p. 253 (1765).

Although this practice had effectively been abandoned in England long before the close of the American colonial period, absolute executive vetoes were still exercised by some royal governors within the American colonies. See Commonwealth ex rel. Attorney General v. Barnett, 199 Pa. 161, 48 A. 976 (1901).

This use of the absolute executive veto created such discontent among the colonists that the absolute executive veto was listed first among the enumerated grievances in the Declaration of Independence: "He has refused his assent to laws the most wholesome and necessary for the public good."

Thus was born the United States Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

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