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The Separation of Powers doctrine is where the legislative (lawmakers) executive (police), and judicial (judges) should remain separated in order to act as a check against each other’s power.¹

Under that doctrine, all three branches of government are to be elected and accountable to the people at the general election. While we still elect our governor and legislature, we no longer elect our judges; and while he is elected, the position of Sheriff has been subdued to an ancillary arm of the executive/judicial, serving at the governor’s pleasure.²

Wendell Phillips was one of the first to argue against the use of elected Sheriffs by stating, “a police force appointed by the voters of the place cannot be relied on to execute the laws; and, in order to secure their full and impartial execution, it has been found necessary elsewhere, and I shall attempt to show you that it is necessary here, to put the control of the police force into other hands than those of the voters of the place.”³ It was through arguments such as this that we gained municipal police departments toward the latter half of the 19th century. Our police are now unelected; instead they are hired and must agree to protect and serve the Statutes - not the people - which are a copyrighted form of private administrative law.

Legislatures pass public laws, not statutes. Public laws as passed by our legislators are public property, belonging to everybody; public laws therefore cannot be “copyrighted” as a literary work and owned by any one particular person or group. Most states, however, have adopted “revised statutes” which have been revised, collected, arranged in order and re-enacted as a whole,⁴ thus making them a private literary work. In Maine, our Maine Revised Satutes are copyrighted by the government of the State of Maine,⁵ which makes them a form of private, administrative law not owned by We the People.

In addition to co-opting our police and making them beholden to the government instead of the people, our judges have also been hijacked. In 1961 we lost our locally controlled municipal courts to the District Court system.⁶ From its inception, judges were no longer elected by the people they serve, but appointed by and beholden to the governor out of the private, unelected club called the Maine Bar Association.⁷ Later on, in 1967, the people of Maine supposedly passed an amendment to the Maine Constitution that repealed the office of judges as Constitutional officers⁸ which released them from the bounds of the Constitution and caused them to become administrative officers of the state nominated by and beholden to only the governor, not the people, for their occupation of that office.⁹ Once in power, judges are checked by a governing body stacked with a majority of “brother” Bar Association members¹⁰ and are no longer accountable to the people they serve, only the statutes.

Municipal police forces were formed under that private commercial law called statutes and enforce it by bringing citizens in front of a judge who was appointed by the same political power which authorized them to exist. It is that same political power that then jails citizens in the County jail because the elected Sheriff must perform at the governor’s behest or suffer removal.²

We the People in Maine no longer enjoy a Separation of Powers doctrine such as Madison envisioned¹ but instead must bow and submit to a tyranny of private, copyrighted administrative statutes where the executive, legislative and judicial branches all act in concert with each other to protect and serve themselves - no longer We the People.

¹. see Federalist 48

2. Maine Constitution, Article IX, Sec. 10

3. Speeches, Lectures, and Letters by Wendell Phillips, ©1864 Walker, Wise and Company, p. 496

4. Black’s Law 5th ed.

5. http://janus.state.me.us/legis/statutes/disclaimer.htm

6. P.L., 1961, c. 386, effective Sept. 16, 1961

7. The Maine District Court: A Quarter Century of Progress, Hon. Harriet P. Henry ©1987 Tower Publishing Co., pp. 11-12

8. 105th Amendment to the Maine Constitution.

9. Maine Constitution, Article V, Part First, Sec. 8

10. Order Establishing Committee on Judicial Responsibility and Disability, Maine Rules of Court ©2001 West Group, p. 401