The corruption of Hamas and Amy Coney Barrett on the power of the law
An Israeli air strike on Doha, Qatar, killed five members of Hamas and a member of Qatar’s Internal Security Force yesterday. The strike took place shortly after Hamas claimed responsibility for a shooting that killed six people at a bus stop in Jerusalem on Monday.
Hamas leaders were gathered in Qatar to discuss a US proposal for a ceasefire in Gaza. However, the New York Times also reports that the attack “targeted a residential headquarters where a number of senior Hamas politicians lived.”
Here’s a question worth considering: Why were Hamas leaders living in a residence more than a thousand miles from the Gaza Strip they presumably serve?
And here’s what many people don’t know: Many of Hamas’s leaders living abroad are billionaires. According to the Telegraph, those living in Qatar do so in “five-star luxury.” This while, according to the United Nations, 65 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza live below the poverty line.
This disparity exists because Hamas is a dictatorship. After it came to power in Gaza in 2007, there have been no more elections.
Its terrorist leaders could therefore stage a horrific invasion of Israel on Oct. 7 with no accountability to the people of Gaza. They can profit personally while impoverishing the population. They can hide themselves and their soldiers and weapons behind civilian shields because they view the people as a means to their ends.
In fact, they want Israeli soldiers to harm Gazan civilians in order to turn public opinion against Israel and advance Hamas.
“A government of laws, not of men”
By contrast, as John Adams noted, the United States is “a government of laws, not of men.”
Americans elect the president by national vote, the Senate by statewide vote, and the House of Representatives by district vote. These leaders then enact laws intended to serve the common good. If we disagree, we can elect leaders who will revise or rescind such laws, as has been done often in our history.
But what about holding our leaders accountable to the laws of the land? James Madison noted: “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
To enable such control, the Founders devised another layer of accountability, creating an unelected Supreme Court whose sole job is to interpret the Constitution and other laws as written and hold leaders and their actions accountable to them.
Amy Coney Barrett’s new book
These reflections have been on my mind in light of yesterday’s publication of Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution by Supreme Court associate justice Amy Coney Barrett. Her book is both readable and deeply fascinating, with behind-the-scenes descriptions of the actual work of the Court as well as her explanation of its function.
She states that the Court’s story cannot be separated from the US Constitution, “which is both its birth certificate and life’s work.” Accordingly, she writes:
We judges don’t dispense justice solely as we see it; instead, we’re constrained by law adopted through the democratic process. We exercise authority that the people have given us and resolve disputes according to the ground rules that the people have prescribed. . . .
In our system, a judge must abide by the rules set by the American people, both in the Constitution and legislation. . . . The guiding principle in every case is what the law requires, not what aligns with the judge’s own concept of justice.
Justice Barrett cites the death penalty as a personal example. A number of years ago, she co-authored an academic article “expressing a moral objection to capital punishment.” Then, soon after her appointment, the Court considered a death sentence imposed on Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers. She joined the Court’s holding that Tsarnaev’s death sentence was valid. As she notes,
That was not the only course open to me. Given my view of capital punishment, I could have looked for ways to slant the law in favor of defendants facing the death penalty. There were, after all, plausible arguments going Tsarnaev’s way—the court of appeals agreed with him, as did three of my colleagues in dissent. Had I voted in favor of Tsarnaev, no one would have known that I did it because I objected to the death penalty rather than because I concluded that Tsarnaev had the better of the argument.
But that would have been a dereliction of duty. . . . My office doesn’t entitle me to align the legal system with my moral or policy views. Swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is, not what it should be.
As she explains, judges are “referees, not kings, because they decide whether people have played by the rules rather than what the rules should be.”
“The hallmark of a life of holiness”
As Justice Barrett’s book and the corruption of Hamas officials both illustrate, a government of laws rather than of men is enormously preferrable to the reverse. However, such laws are of course created and enforced by people. And people, including the Founders, are obviously fallen and flawed. (Consider that the large majority of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, with its assertion that “all men are created equal,” were slaveowners at the time.)
This is why fallen people need wisdom beyond our own. It is why we need the laws of God and the power of God by which to obey them. The good news is that, as I noted yesterday, the same Holy Spirit who inspired the word of God now guides us to interpret it and empowers us to obey it.
The key is wanting such guidance and power. It is wanting to live by a higher standard than anything humans can produce. It is seeking the holiness only a holy God can manifest in us, measuring ourselves by the “fruit” of his Spirit in our lives (Galatians 5:22–23) and paying any price to settle for nothing less.
Br. Lucas Hall of the Society of St. John the Evangelist in Boston notes:
We might not be able to see over the horizon, but the pitched battle between good and evil that happens within the very mundane, day-to-day aspects of our lives is one we can take up again and again. The call to continue that work is the hallmark of a life of holiness. It may cost us everything: our lives, our understanding, our sense of clarity; and that offering is holy enough.
Will you seek such a “life of holiness” today?
Quote for the day:
“When you open your Bible, God opens his mouth.” —Mark Batterson
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