Ted Cruz states outright the justices violated their judicial oaths by rewriting Obamacare again in order to save a failed law and then by close decision that not only redefines marriage but also undermines the foundation of representative government. Now 320 million people are ruled by a 9-member council, unelected and with lifetime terms.
Ted Cruz insists the judicial activism is lawless.
Hang on. That déjà vu thing is happening again really hard this time.
Ted Cruz reiterates everything that flooded social media last week, that words have no meaning when the term "established by a state" means "established by the state", the difference there is between indefinite article and definite article, a/the but bearing on common low-level confusion about federalism meaning more power with states and less power in unifying layer of federal government. Common as that. Cruz takes up the term SCOTUSCare. He commiserates his party will pretend anger but is actually complicit.
Ted Cruz offers subversion. He's already introduced a constitutional amendment to preserve authority of elected state legislatures to define marriage...
Talk about a lost cause.
... and stripping federal courts of jurisdiction over legal assaults on marriage. Also repeal Obamacare.
What, I thought it's called SCOTUSCare now. Make up my mind.
"But there is a broader problem: The Court's brazen action undermines its very legitimacy."
Finally, we're at what we came for.
Ted Cruz cites Justice Scalia, hubris, pride, fall, with each step the court takes that makes decisions properly left to the People themselves, and not based on law but on "reasoned judgment" of a bare majority the court moves one step closer to being reminded of their impotence.
Cruz claims the Court's decision is not tied to reason and logic, that they are alien to our constitutional system by redefining the meaning of common words and redesigning the most basic human institutions. The court crossed from activism to oligarchy.
Cruz harbors a list of grievances against the Supreme Court.
* condemned millions innocent unborn to death
* banished God from schools and public squares
* extended constitutional protections to prisoners of war on foreign soil
* authorized confiscation of property of one private owner to transfer to another
* now, required all Americans to buy specific product
* force all AMericans to accept redefinition of institution ordained by God and long predating the Court
Many attempts have been made to compel the Court to Constitutional fidelity but as Justice Alito said, "Today's decision shows that decades of attempts to restrain this Court's abuse of its authority have failed."
I am looking for Ted Cruz's remedies.
Ted Cruz reiterates the history of states passing laws to be superseded by higher courts. He reiterates the contortion of rewriting important law so that they can be considered legal. He asserts the early framers did not anticipate judicial tyranny on this scale. He insists the justices are not meeting the constitutional provision that justices "shall hold their Offices during good Behavior" and they are far from meeting this standard. Cruz discusses more of what the framers did and did not anticipate.
Whoa. Skip, skip, skippity-skip looking for Ted Cruz's remedies, this: "The decisions that have deformed our constitutional order and have debased our culture are but symptoms of the disease of liberal judicial activism that has infected our judiciary."
Them's fight'n words. I like.
Cruz notes twenty states adopted a form of judicial retention elections allowing people to pass judgment of the judgement of their judges. He notes also California removed three activists that repeatedly contorted the state constitution to effectively outlaw capital punishment no matter how bad the crime. So too did Nebraska remove a judge that overturned a law subjecting legislators to term limits. Iowa removed three judges who had, like the Supreme Court justices, invented constitutional rights.
So that's it then. Judicial retention elections. The next five paragraphs support this idea.
11 comments:
LIV just won't care. Roe v Wade was about a much more horrible subject and nobody cared. Years later, people recognize it as a bad decision, not on the merits of the subject, but the merits of the rational to reach the decision. Still, there is no interest in a remedy to it. The early 20th Century Progressive movement was never stopped by legislative remedies.
Go you one better.
The Liberty Amendments, specifically #3.
The Judiciary was never meant to be an all-powerful institution in which five men in robes have the final say over every major policy battle in the country. In order to end judicial tyranny, limit service to one 12-year term, and granting both Congress and the state legislatures the authority to overturn court decisions with the vote of three-fifths of both houses of Congress or state legislative bodies.
Yawn. Any talk short of secession or neo-Confederate firebranding is just the same old bullshit we've been used to hearing these dead-enders spout for a hundred years. Say something new. Finding ways to endlessly politicize the only nearly non-political branch of government is just another predictably partisan Republican tactic. Why be a professional when you can be a partisan, say the Republicans? Yep, we've heard it before. Spare us.
We've had elections for judges here and honestly I don't see how people are expected to keep up with individual judge's opinions and how things come about.
But that's local. And that was then.
It really is all the same stuff rehashed. But now it's grown on pretty much everyone's nerves I sense from my self-enduced hermitage, I'd jump at the chance of getting rid of Supreme Court justices, those people I would know more about (except I'll no longer see them fallen down drunk at holiday parties) lowest and most putrid of all the courts, ever signifying complete social failure. Ewww there's a big ol' grasshopper right on my tank it looked like a spider.
Did I tell you, I saw one of those moths that looks like a hummingbird buzzing around my flowers. Right after I recorded 10 minutes of storms passing through. Downpour, hail, sun, rain, dark, more sun, rain, gray, flat dark low clouds, tornado, the whole bit.
The rain killed a clematis and is killing a second. What a bummer. I had hopes for those two vines, blue going one way and white going the other. I saw the whole thing, in my mind and then they both drowned. The good part is, the rest of the caladiums (heart-shaped leaf, various bizarre patterns, shade plants from bulbs) are popping up, and boy are they ever popping all over the place. Those two guys were right, the bulb place guy said wait a few more days and the video guy said gouge out their eyes, BOOM, heart-shape leaves poking up all over.
Ritmo blathers, as always, at the sound of somebody wanting to reform the system now that the Lefties have gamed it to their satisfaction.
And his crowd needs to tell Troll Central to find better writers.
Neo-Confederate is showing up on every comment board on the 'Net.
Dead giveaway.
I would be satisfied with (1) 18 year term limits and (2) the ability of states to recall judicial decisions by a 2/3 vote.
It should be noted that people some how imagine the SCOTUS is a check on the Congress and President, but its really a very weak check. Congress decides how many Judges are on the court and they can pack it anytime they wish. They can also decide what kind of cases the SCOTUS/Apealette courts can hear. That's right in the Constitution. Tomorrow the Congress could simply state no that the US courts have no right to hear cases bearing on gay marriage. That would -de facto -overturn the current ruling. This is never done because the SCOTUS almost always rules in favor of the power elite.
BTW, I find it amusing that people like Gov Huckleberry engage in a lot of heated rhetoric about Gay Marriage and other court cases, but never actually propose a remedy. With him, its all just demagoguery
At Cruz seems somewhat sincere.
Judicial appointments aren't "gamed". They're just something that Republicans can't control alone. So some unemployed guy pretends to oppose it. Yawn. Someone needs something more personal to worry about.
Sen. Cruz is right in the problem, but very wrong in the solution -- i.e., his idea of a "judicial retention" election every eight years.
Here I admit I'm confused on a detail: is there but one election, eight years after appointment, or does it recur every eight years? Either way it's a bad idea.
If it's a one-time thing, then what do you do when the justice goes rogue after the retention election? So the logic of the idea demands recurrence. And in that case, consider this: the following Justices would all have come up for retention during President Obama's two terms: Roberts, Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas and Alito.
And of course the administration, together with its allies, would have poured vast resources into those retention elections. They wouldn't need to defeat all of them; just one or two.
Any proposal that risks losing Justices Scalia and Thomas should not have the support of conservatives.
Setting aside an analysis of this idea from it's impact, there's this. Any number of court decisions are going to have unpopular results, no matter how right they are as a matter of law.
Consider the whole string of decisions that were, in their time, decried as letting criminals off scot-free. In at least many of them (I won't try to characterize every one of them), the issue was clear: the criminal walked because his or her fundamental constitutional rights were violated. In the Lilly Ledbetter case, more recently, we had a very sympathetic individual who argued her right to fair pay was violated. But the court found that the law, as then written, didn't enable her to make the claim she wanted to make. The law could be changed, and needed to be, in order for her to do it. And, of course, the dissent argued the law as it existed, did support her claim. I am not able to parse that case to say which side was right; but the point I am making is that it was a question of fact -- what does the law actually allow -- regardless of how sympathetic the central figure.
If the high court's rulings on, say, criminal rights, or prayer in public schools, had been put to a referendum, the court would have lost; but not because they were wrong on the law, but because people didn't like the result.
Oh yes, there's a problem with the courts; but this is the wrong solution.
I might add...
Sen. Cruz is no dummy. He not only can see what I laid out, he knows the following things:
> In order to enact a constitutional amendment (i.e., to create judicial retention elections), he needs a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, as well as three-fourths of the state legislatures to ratify it. That is an extremely high burden.
> There are other remedies that do not require such a high hurdle. Congress has full power to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Even if such legislation is vetoed, that only gets him back to the two-thirds majority; but saves him from arduous ratification by the states. And by a simple majority, the Senate alone can refuse to confirm a justice.
So, when he focuses on a constitutional amendment, I have to wonder why.
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