I.       REPLY TO STATE DEFENDANTS’ RESPONSE TO MOTION TO STAY

          OF JUDGMENT IMPOSING LITIGATION BAR PENDING APPEAL

 

          Now comes the appellant, Roger W. Knight, to respond to the State Officers’ response to his motion for stay of the judgment below imposing litigation bar, Order Regarding Motions for Summary Judgment, Document No. 65, pages 11-14, ER 25-28.

          Barbara W. Tuchman is a historian who has written a series of best selling non-fiction books about history.  Her 1962 work, The Guns of August, exploring the decisions and events that led to World War I, was famously read by President Kennedy and may have given him the insight that allowed him to prevent the Cuban Missile Crisis from spiraling out of control.  Kennedy admitted that Khrushchev was as rightly concerned about the threat to his nation’s security posed by American missiles in Turkey as he was concerned about the Soviet missiles in Cuba.  Khrushchev understood that Kennedy cannot be seen as trading the missiles in Turkey for the missiles in Cuba, even though that was part of the trade.  Some consideration of the other nation’s needs avoided a terrible war.

          Tuchman’s 1984 work, The March of Folly From Troy to Vietnam, has some insight that is directly applicable to this case.  At the start on the section concerning the follies of the British government that led to the American Revolution, she wrote:

Britain’s self interest as regards her empire on the American continent in the 18th century was clearly to maintain her sovereignty, and for every reason of trade, peace and profit to maintain with the goodwill and by voluntary desire of the colonies.  Yet, through the fifteen years of deteriorating relations that led up to the shot heard round the world, successive British ministries, in the face of constant warnings by men and events, repeatedly took measures that injured the relationship.  However justifiable in principle, these measures, insofar as they progressively destroyed goodwill and the voluntary connection, were demonstrably unwise in practice, besides being impossible to implement except by force.  Since force could only mean enmity, the cost of the effort, even if successful, was clearly greater than the possible gain.  In the end, Britain made rebels where there had been none.

 

The “shot heard round the world” is her reference to the events of April 19, 1775.  Prior to that date, the Americans did everything EXCEPT violence to resolve the situation.  They offered to tax themselves through their colonial legislative assemblies to pay the costs of their military defense.  The British government in London refused even to tell the American representatives, including Benjamin Franklin, the amount of money that needed to be raised.  Instead, they insisted on imposing taxes by a Parliament that did not include American representatives.  And because the Americans objected to this and resisted the taxes, boycotting the products of British manufacture, the British imposed ever greater and more punitive measures to enforce the divine rights of King and Parliament.

          Apply Tuchman’s logic to this case:  However justifiable in principle, these child support orders and measures to enforce same, insofar as they progressively destroy goodwill and the voluntary connection, are demonstrably unwise in practice, besides being impossible to implement except by force.  Since force can only mean enmity, the cost of the effort, even if successful, is clearly greater than the possible gain.  In the end, the State Officers make rebels where there had been none.  Mr. Tim Eyman suffers from no shortage of signature gatherers.

          What Mr. Knight has done, like Ben Franklin before, is to attempt, without resorting to violence or threat, to speak reason to the unreasonable.  The problem with the repeated unpublished decisions against Mr. Knight, and the problem with United States v. Ballek, (9th Cir. 1999) 170 F. 3d. 871, is that these decisions do not interpret the Thirteenth Amendment and the Antipeonage Act, but express a fundamental disagreement with the policy that underlies these provisions.  Where the courts express such disagreement with policy and refuse to enforce the policy, creating out of whole cloth their exceptions to the policy, the rule of law is necessarily diminished.  Persons of Japanese ancestry have experienced that.

          Where there has been a complete breakdown in the rule of law, as happened in America in 1775, in France in 1789, and in Russia in 1917, it is because there was no rule of law in the first place that protected the rights of the people.  However necessary a well regulated militia may be to the security of a free state, if the state is not free, it is not secure.

          No serious disagreement can be made with the proposition that a statute defining as a felony the marriage of a man of one race with a woman of another race, to enforce the state’s interest in the prevention of the birth of children of mixed race ancestry, is repugnant to the manifest tenor of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Both as to the rights of the couple, and as to the implication for respect to the rights of all persons born of such unions.

          Yet under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, Loving v. Virginia, (1967) 388 U.S. 1, 18 L. Ed. 2d. 1010, 85 S. Ct. 1817 is a void decision.  The Lovings brought action in a federal district court challenging the validity of the statute in question.  While the federal courts ordinarily have original jurisdiction to hear such a claim under 28 U.S.C. §1343 and 42 U.S.C. §1983, if there had been a final state court judgment involving the statute, and there was, the federal court did not have appellate jurisdiction to consider the issue and the Supreme Court did not have jurisdiction to decide the issue on appeal.  Even though it was a criminal conviction, the Lovings were not asserting habeas corpus jurisdiction, they were only attacking the statute that defined their marriage as unlawful.

          Of course, for the State Officers to assert that Mr. Knight’s attempt to enforce the doctrine established in Troxel v. Granville, (2000) 530 U.S. 57, 147 L. Ed. 2d. 49, 120 S. Ct. 2054, 2061, that “so long as a parent adequately cares for his or her children (i.e., is fit), there will normally be no reason for the State to inject itself into the private realm of the family to further question the ability of that parent to make the best decisions concerning the rearing of that parent’s children” and that to do so is offensive to the Fourteenth Amendment, against a state court child support order of 1991, ER 97-113, that went well beyond what was necessary to allow adequate care for the children, found barred by Rooker-Feldman, as “frivolous” runs counter to this Court’s established doctrine that jurisdiction to hear the underlying claim is irrelevant to whether the underlying claim is wholly without merit and an arguable basis either in law or fact.  As it was, Mr. Knight’s attempt to enforce the Troxel doctrine was not found frivolous by either district court or this Court in that action.

          The cases cited by the State Officers where sanctions were imposed upon Mr. Knight for bringing a frivolous claim predated Brent Moss v. Superior Court, (1996) 56 Cal. Rptr. 2d. 864, 868-870.  If the California Court of Appeals is correct in its interpretation of the Antipeonage Act, and if the United States Supreme Court eventually adopts this interpretation, as it must to be consistent with its own rules of statutory construction, then every action taken by Mr. Knight in the courts is in self defense against those who commit the felony defined by 18 U.S.C. §1581.  Therefore, every such action taken by Mr. Knight is not frivolous, the child support order and the enforcement of the order is declared null and void by 42 U.S.C. §1994 and is the crime defined by 18 U.S.C. §1581.

          The inherent right to self defense against a felony of enslavement, found in La Amistad, (1841) 40 U.S. 518, 10 L. Ed. 826, is expressed by RCW 9A.16.050 which provides that a homicide is justifiable when there is reasonable ground on the part of the slayer to apprehend a design on the part of the person slain to commit a felony and in an actual resistance of the attempt to commit a felony upon the slayer.

          Mr. Knight, of course, prefers the nonviolent and nonlethal presentation of argument as to the law, to any action of violence and homicide, however justifiable violence and homicide may be.  Because the litigation bar cannot be reasonably sustained to prohibit assertion of the protection of the Antipeonage Act and to prohibit claims against the validity of the Washington WorkFirst Act because none of such claims are wholly without merit and an arguable basis either in law or fact, it should be lifted as soon as possible.

II.      CONCLUSION

          For the reasons stated herein, this Appellant’s Motion for Stay of Judgment Imposing Litigation Bar Pending Appeal should be granted.

Respectfully submitted this 6th day of March, 2003,

 

                                                _________________________________

                                                          Roger W. Knight, appellant pro se

 

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