I’m not generally in favor of the Andrew Jackson way of dealing with the Supreme Court but there is no practical check on the Court through the amendment process as some have suggested here. A 5 to 4 ruling is trivial in comparison to the effort to get two thirds of Congress and three fourth of the State legislatures to agree on anything. Both Congress and State Legislatures are accountable for their decisions; the Court is not in any practical sense. When the Court makes rulings on precedent or references existing laws and bypasses the enumerated limits placed on each branch by doing so it has essentially gone “rogue” and it has done that numerous times over the last 50-60 years without a single amendment or Congressional response to that. If the Court won’t honor the existing enumerated Constitution with decades to 150 years of tradition and practice to back that up what makes anyone here think amending the Constitution would change that practice?
Each of us to varying degrees lead tempered lives because we are to varying degrees held accountable for important things and decisions in our own lives. The essence of the three branches and checks and balances on each was to impart some sense of accountability on the government as a whole. The Court has no such accountability mechanism in practice. Jackson famously told the Court of his time to stuff it and if they didn’t like that command their army to do something about it. I don’t remember the specifics or who was in the right from a constitutional prospective but no one came and arrested Jackson as a result. TR couldn’t get the money he wanted to sail the navy around the world from Congress so he ordered it to sail and go until Congress found the money or they ran out of fuel. They got the fuel. The merits of these individual cases are not important but the back and forth and check on the power of each branch is. Our Supreme Court is “rouge”. The cumulative damage done by this over the decades out shadows the narrower rulings the four existing conservative justices try to maintain.
If the Court rules King Obamacare constitutional, there will be civil unrest or worse. Most people can sense when the façade of a Republic is stripped away for all to see. I wouldn’t want to be in Justice Kennedy’s shoes if he has any sense of what this last nail in the coffin of the Constitution will invoke. The Court ruled in 1866 that several of the things Lincoln did during the war were unconstitutional. A pointless gesture if there ever was one. Serfdom is just around the corner for many if the Court does not restore the Republic.
The Gunslinger
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