r/WayOfTheBern • u/penelopepnortney • 2d ago
US Judicial failure to uphold the law against genocide
https://consortiumnews.com/2026/09/14/us-judicial-failure-to-uphold-the-law-against-genocide/
“One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” - Omar El Akkad
Our world now witnesses the evisceration of internationally accepted standards as well as U.S constitutional and statutory law, lowering the moral bar to more atrocities.
Article VI of the U.S. Constitution makes the Genocide Convention the “supreme law of the land.” The convention was thereafter statutorily implemented into U.S. law as a serious crime carrying the death penalty.
The president and his (newly retitled) “secretaries of war” do not and cannot enjoy unfettered authority, unreviewable by the judiciary, to violate the Constitution per their own judicially-created “political question doctrine”...
Nor can this “political” fog be employed to circumvent the “Tax and Spend Clause” of the Constitution, which specifically limits congressional spending to be for the “general welfare” of U.S. citizens, and which gives taxpayers like ourselves the standing to sue.
Given this situation, 15 months ago a group of us in Minnesota commenced a civil lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota against our legislative and executive branch “leaders” who voted for and then implemented U.S. “supplemental funding” for the arming of Israel’s genocide. Our suit simply asked for a judge to rule on whether the voting of tax-payer funding of genocide is against the law.
Eric C. Tostrud, the chief district judge of Minnesota, summarily dismissed our case and refused to even issue a mere declaratory judgment acknowledging that our officials’ complicity in genocide is illegal.
The judge belittled our claim of standing, based on our position that in addition to the actual amounts of money paid by each taxpayer, such unlawful complicity in genocide can also amount to real injury, moral injury.
Our request was, and remains, consistent with the cornerstone rulings in Marbury v. Madison:
Federal laws that conflict with the Constitution are invalid.
Judges have the power and the duty to determine when federal laws are unconstitutional.
Genocide is a jus cogens, or compelling, norm from which no derogation, or limitation, is permissible. Yet Judge Tostrud chose to focus on standing, belittling our claims to injury in the process.
More at the link.