Posts Tagged ‘US Supreme Court’
Nullification Should Be Taken Seriously, Not Caricatured
Art Carden, Forbes Blog, July 6, 2010
The weeks surrounding Independence Day are always a good time to assess the American experiment in liberty. For all of our successes, there remains a lot of discontent across the political spectrum. The federal government is fighting the states over the issue of medical marijuana, for example, and we’re also preparing to add to the Supreme Court a justice who apparently thinks that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech” with respect to speech means that “Congress shall weigh the costs and benefits of making a law” before passing a law “abridging the freedom of speech.” What option do the people and the states have if they disagree and wish to hold fast to the “Congress shall make no law” principle? Or what if they think the Federal government is overstepping its constitutional bounds?
Enter prize-winning historian and bestselling author Thomas E. Woods. I’ve had the pleasure of working with Professor Woods at the Mises Institute’s “Mises University” summer program and trading notes about some of his projects, so I was looking forward to his new book. In Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century, Professor Woods offers a thorough-but-compact discussion of the doctrine of nullification. As he writes, “(n)ullification begins with the axiomatic point that a federal law that violates the Constitution is no law at all” (p. 3). It is, according to the framework established by the Founders, an essential part of the system of checks and balances that defined the federal union. Even though they established federal-level checks and balances, the founders were troubled by the notion that the Federal government should be its own judge.
Read more at http://blogs.forbes.com/booked/2010/07/06/nullification-should-be-taken-seriously-not-caricatured/
Constitution Is Endangered If Kagan OK’d
By PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY, IBD Editorials, 6/29/2010
Barack Obama revealed his goal for the Supreme Court when he complained on Chicago radio station WBEZ-FM in 2001 that the Earl Warren Court wasn’t “radical” enough because “it didn’t break free from the essential constraints placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution” in order to allow “redistribution of wealth.”
Now that Obama is president, he has the power to nominate Supreme Court justices who will “break free” from the Constitution and join him in “fundamentally transforming” America. That’s the essence of his choice of Elena Kagan as his second Supreme Court nominee. She never was a judge, and her paper trail is short. But it’s long enough to prove that she is a clear and present danger to the Constitution.
When Kagan was dean of Harvard Law School, she presented a guest speaker who is known as the most activist judge in the world: Judge Aharon Barak, formerly president of the Israeli Supreme Court.
The polar opposite of the U.S. Constitution, which states that “all legislative powers” are vested in the elected legislative body, Barak has written that a judge should “make” and “create” law, assume “a role in the legislative process” and give statutes “new meaning that suits new social needs.”
Barak wrote that a judge “is subject to no authority” except himself, and he “must sometimes depart the confines of his legal system and channel into it fundamental values not yet found in it.” Channel? Does he mean he channels in a trance, as Hillary Clinton supposedly channeled discourse with the long-deceased Eleanor Roosevelt?
Despite Barak’s weirdo writings, or maybe because of them, Kagan called him her “judicial hero.” Judge Robert Bork, a man careful with his words, says Kagan’s praise of Barak is “disqualifying in and of itself.” Bork said that Barak “establishes a world record for judicial hubris.” He wrote that Barak embraces a judicial philosophy that “there is no area of Israeli life that the court may not govern.”
Read more at http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article/538850/201006291834/Constitution-Is-Endangered-If-Kagan-OKd.aspx
Kagan Declines To Say Gov’t Has No Power to Tell Americans What To Eat
Sen. Coburn pressed Kagan today on the limits of the government’s power under the commerce clause.
Roberts: Scene at State of Union `very troubling’
by JAY REEVES (AP), March 9, 2010
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts said Tuesday the scene at President Obama’s State of the Union address was “very troubling” and the annual speech has “degenerated to a political pep rally.”
Obama chided the court, with the justices seated before him in their black robes, for its decision on a campaign finance case.
Responding to a University of Alabama law student’s question, Roberts said anyone was free to criticize the court, and some have an obligation to do so because of their positions.
“So I have no problems with that,” he said. “On the other hand, there is the issue of the setting, the circumstances and the decorum.
“The image of having the members of one branch of government standing up, literally surrounding the Supreme Court, cheering and hollering while the court — according the requirements of protocol — has to sit there expressionless, I think is very troubling.”
Read more at http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gyvfRvSPtr5INaLpoyt0_bd8V0AwD9EBCSAG0
High court shows it might be willing to act boldly (McCain-Feingold)
by Robert Barnes, Washington Post Staff Writer, Friday, January 22, 2010
The Roberts court ended its term last summer avoiding a constitutional showdown with Congress over the Voting Rights Act. But its first major decision of the current term might signal a new willingness to act boldly.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his conservative colleagues delivered a seismic jolt Thursday. They overturned two of the court’s past decisions — including one made as recently as six years ago — to upend federal legislation that says corporations may not use their profits to support or oppose candidates and to declare unconstitutional a large portion of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act passed in 2002.
“This is obviously such an exceptionally dramatic, high-profile break with precedent,” said Pamela Harris, executive director of the Supreme Court Institute at Georgetown Law Center. “The question is, what will come next? Perhaps they have exhausted themselves on this one case, or it could have the opposite effect and be energizing. I really don’t know which it will be.”
The court’s future (Roberts and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. were key to the decision) and its past (89-year-old John Paul Stevens led his liberal colleagues in dissent) were on vivid display at the court’s special session to deliver all 176 pages of Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.
Although the majority’s ode to the First Amendment was announced by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, it would not have been possible without Roberts and Alito, President George W. Bush’s nominees to the court.
Read more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/21/AR2010012101724_pf.html
And what is Senator Russ Feingold best known for?
Why the Health-Care Bills Are Unconstitutional
If the government can mandate the purchase of insurance, it can do anything.
By Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, J. Kenneth Blackwell, and Kenneth A. Klukowski, Opinion Column, Wall Street Journal, January 2, 2010
President Obama’s health-care bill is now moving toward final passage. The policy issues may be coming to an end, but the legal issues are certain to continue because key provisions of this dangerous legislation are unconstitutional. Legally speaking, this legislation creates a target-rich environment. We will focus on three of its more glaring constitutional defects.
First, the Constitution does not give Congress the power to require that Americans purchase health insurance. Congress must be able to point to at least one of its powers listed in the Constitution as the basis of any legislation it passes. None of those powers justifies the individual insurance mandate. Congress’s powers to tax and spend do not apply because the mandate neither taxes nor spends. The only other option is Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce.
Congress has many times stretched this power to the breaking point, exceeding even the expanded version of the commerce power established by the Supreme Court since the Great Depression. It is one thing, however, for Congress to regulate economic activity in which individuals choose to engage; it is another to require that individuals engage in such activity. That is not a difference in degree, but instead a difference in kind. It is a line that Congress has never crossed and the courts have never sanctioned.
Read more at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703278604574624021919432770.html