Understanding how we got into our judicial mess
Brian Anderson in City Journal has a very helpful piece:
It’s worth understanding how our courts got into this mess, so we can see how imperative it is to get them out. The government by judiciary we now have is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. The original originalists, they imagined that a life-tenured, independent judiciary would merely interpret the law as the people’s elected representatives made it—including the supreme law embodied in the Constitution. But they would have no right to create law. As Alexander Hamilton explained in The Federalist: “The courts must declare the sense of the law, and if they should be disposed to exercise WILL instead of JUDGMENT, the consequence would equally be the substitution of their pleasure to that of the legislative body.” For the Framers, that would be tyranny and should end in impeachment.
The Supreme Court took on the awesome powers it wields today with three big cases, at intervals of half a century.
The cases are Dred Scott, Lochner and Brown v. Board of Education.
All things considered, we’d rather be playing the Republican hand in the important nominations and confirmations coming up, even with the numerous GOP weak sisters in the Senate. The Democrats’ playbook is just so old and boring. The nominee is racist and extreme, will deprive women and minorities of fundamental rights — with quotes and decisions bent to fit the story line. This will be followed by an attempt to reframe the issue in some focused-grouped way, as the Dems frankly did a nice job with in the “Bolton as abuser” matter. Simultaneously there will be attempts to stage procedural delays, centered around some “critical” documents which the judge or the administration “stonewalls” on. Finally, there will be dramatic revelations and accusations by former associate of the judge at the last minute — a Thursday afternoon, if we had to guess — accompanied by calls to withdraw the nominee and/or postpone and vote.
How many times can you watch the same insipid movie without changing the channel?