by Sharon Rondeau
(May 21, 2022) — In September 2010, New Jersey citizen, military veteran and constitutional scholar Nicholas Purpura and co-plaintiff Donald R. Laster filed a 19-point lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act, colloquially known as “Obamacare,” which eventually was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in late 2011. The law, passed in December 2009 without a single Republican “yea” vote, was unconstitutional, Purpura and Laster maintained, because as a revenue-raising bill, it should have originated in the House of Representatives in accordance with Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution.
In addition, Purpura and Laster wrote, the bill “prohibits judicial review” and violated numerous federal laws and protections guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. “You can’t prove me wrong,” Purpura said.
The Supreme Court denied the plaintiffs’ petition for a Writ of Certiorari in January 2012, and a petition for rehearing was “denied without comment” the following month.
Purpura believes that self-represented plaintiffs (pro se) receive more prejudicial treatment than those represented by attorneys.
In late 2013, Purpura and John Anthony, founder of Sustainable Freedom Lab, produced a video making the case that the passage of the ACA was not only unconstitutional, but also violated criminal statutes.
In 2015, Purpura filed a challenge to his state’s restrictive handgun laws against then-Gov. Chris Christie (R) and other government officials, including members of the legislature. Purpura contended that Christie and those upholding the restrictions were committing RICO violations as well as violations of federal civil-rights laws under 42 USC 1983.
After the state, district and appellate courts denied Purpura’s petition, claiming he lacked “standing,” he again appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“The lower courts never considered this legal filing to be about an important constitutional challenge and cared even less about whether or not New Jersey is violating Civil Rights by infringing on the Second Amendment,” Purpura wrote in his appeal from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. “It was all about who the Defendants were and their official positions. In a nutshell, the rule of man appears to have been permitted to trump the rule of law. This Petitioner is confident that this Honorable Court will not allow that to stand.”
The case was extensively covered by fellow New Jerseyan and TPATH founder Dwight Kehoe as well as by Fredy Lowe, another New Jersey citizen and blogger.
Several years ago, TPATH was taken offline but relaunched as a Wix website.
By statute, New Jersey does not allow average citizens to carry a handgun in public (“open carry“) and states they must demonstrate a “justifiable need” to carry a concealed handgun.
“The lower courts repeatedly violated the law and ignored all the case law examples in there,” Purpura said, for which the Supreme Court ultimately denied certiorari on October 30, 2017.
At the time, no “Second Amendment” organization would join his cause, Purpura recalled in a recent interview with The Post & Email, including the NRA and Second Amendment Foundation (SAF). Purpura believes their reticence stemmed from “the fact that I couldn’t lose; it was cut and dried.”
“These people are crying that they’re advocates,” he said. “They’re not advocates. If they had taken it, they couldn’t lose, but they didn’t. They’re only advocates for themselves and donations. Then we turn off the spigot.”
Purpura’s latest communication with The Post & Email concerned a new project which he believes could restore constitutional governance in all 50 states, not only in regard to New Jersey Second Amendment issues, but also the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Nearing age 80, Purpura said he sees this latest effort as a mission. The documents he drafted, which contain extensive citations of case law, demand that the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee act to remove judges who have committed “high crimes and misdemeanors” by failing to uphold the principles contained in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
“Selective enforcement by the judiciary places the Court and the ruling jurist above the law,” Purpura wrote in a Writ of Mandamus directed to the committee. “Such actions would be a violation of their oath of office and equates, on the part of the Court, to a seditious and treasonous crime. This is according to Supreme Court concurring ‘stare decisis’ authorities.”
“I know as a pro se I won the case against Sebelius and all the way up there,” Purpura told The Post & Email. “I won the Second Amendment against Christie; I did one against [current New Jersey Gov. Phil] Murphy. But they turned a blind eye. So I asked myself if I wanted to go through all that again for years. No. I want to go to the Senate to try to force them to act: ‘You’re the one who approved them for office; now you’re the one to take them out on a high crime and a misdemeanor.’ It’s worse than that: it’s sedition and, by Supreme Court stare decisis decision, you can even lose your citizenship. My dream has always been that everyone demand of the Supreme Court that they answer those questions.”
“Two weeks ago, Donald Trump, Jr. came out and said he wants to form a task force on the Second Amendment,” Purpura said. “If you read my Writ carefully, you can’t argue with me. Every liberal and conservative judge has ruled on these cases. This is not just a Second Amendment argument. The First Amendment is free speech.” As for the Sixth and Seventh Amendments, Purpura said, “Habeas corpus was abandoned with the January 6 arrests.”
“So I’m putting out my brief. I’ll wager that no one at the Supreme Court or the entire judiciary can stand before me and try to prove me wrong; you cannot. So what they’re going to do is ignore. That’s been the modus operandi of our Congress and the Judiciary.
“It’s not the Second Amendment so much, but the key here is constitutional carry without a license or permit. There is no law, and this is the Supreme Court which stated exactly that. It violates the Constitution. In 2020, Chief Justice Roberts said stare decisis decisions are the law of the land. When you look at my case, how many stare decisis cases are out there? Look at Alito: he said you have to follow your oath of office. Violating your oath is treason. Justice Thomas said this.
“Ginsburg wrote her own opinion on violating the Constitution in Bond v US. Besides, you have the unanimous court ruling you can’t violate the Constitution for any reason whatsoever, and then she added to it with her own brief.
“This is a national issue, and it’s time to go public. The Writ of Mandamus puts everybody on the spot. It goes to the First Amendment, protection of the 14th Amendment, addressing the abuses of the Sixth and Seventh — the entire Bill of Rights. All of them swear to it and then violate their oaths of office. Most people don’t realize there is no expiration date when you take that oath.
“I’m on a ‘hit list’ for uncovering corruption back in the 80s,” Purpura said, “but they wouldn’t give me a carry permit in New Jersey. The FBI came here and said, ‘You’re on the jihadist kill list.’ In the Writ, there is a special note: I have carry permission in other states, but not in New Jersey.
Continuing, he told us:
Whoever controls the language controls the culture. We and the Founding Fathers are the true ‘liberals’; we want the government out of our lives. The word ‘progressive’ came from the Fabians from the Church of 1917. They said communism was moving fast, so they had to make it sound better. The only ‘-ism’ that means anything is patriotism.
You can’t beat the Founders. Lord Acton’s words will be with us forever.
All our constitutional rights are protected in the writ. I covered every area possible. If they rule against it, they are warring against our Constitution. We have to get people to read it. It’s not just the Second Amendment. I covered them all. It reinstates the Andrew Burns proposed amendment: ‘The several words and phrases in this constitution shall be construed to mean what that language was generally understood to mean in the United States during the period in which the enabling ratification of that language took place.’”
Last week, Purpura informed us, he sent his documents to all Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate. “It’s a waste of time and money to send it to the Democrats,” he said.
“Petitioner welcomes any and all assistance in making this public and a reality come true — we must restore all the rights of the people,” Purpura wrote in a follow-up email. “This is our government, not the president’s; not the legislature’s or the judiciary’s — a Republic requires adherence to the rule of law.”