Collins Report-Congress Can Overrule SCOTUS
Sept 5, 2009 13:16:52 GMT -5
Post by 2ncrca on Sept 5, 2009 13:16:52 GMT -5
www.collinsreport.net/
Voluntary judicial tyranny: Congress can over rule the Supreme Court but won’t
09/05/2009
By Bruce Karlson
Last week, we looked at the actual language which should curtail the tyrannical power afforded the US Supreme Court. Supreme Court rulings are only binding “…with such exceptions and under such regulation as the Congress shall make.” (Section 111, Article 2).
Congress has never availed itself of its duty to restrain an activist Court.
Congress failed the first test and has continued ever since: In 1803 under John Marshall, the Court denied relief to William Marbury based on its finding that the Judicial Act of 1789 was unconstitutional. The Congress, apparently pleased that it had won this minor case, left Chief Justice John Marshall’s encroachment (nullifying its law) unchallenged.
Until 1954, this principle was left to fester, and fester it did.
Enter Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall. It took 150 odd years for Congressional disinterest in the sanctity of its prerogatives to metastasize. The cancer was unchecked and spreading. One must understand that the Founders were, to a man, aligned against one branch encroaching on the delegated powers of another.
There was particular fear of Judiciary Branch incursions. The Founders may have believed that lawyers were men of principle who would decline to meddle.
It should be noted that, in 1832, Marshall’s court ruled against Andrew Jackson, who disregarded the ruling with impunity.
The 1954, ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case, however, was never seriously challenged, as most Americans were either uninterested or thought that blacks deserved relief. Amazingly, there was no muscular legal challenge. FDR’s Southern racist Democrats in the House and the Senate moaned, groaned and threatened but really never took on the Court. Pusillanimity apparently still ruled in the Congress.
In short order, we had judges mandating school bus routes and assigning schools by virtue of “racial balance”.
Mrs. Smith’s protestations that she did not want her eight year old going to school fifteen miles away meant nothing.
The fruit of that decision was unending and often produced conflicting “civil rights” decrees, all a function of judicial whim. Meanwhile, the treasury is emptied, lives are uprooted, and the idea that “some animals are more equal than others” is accepted.
We have all witnessed the mess that unctuous judges have wreaked on the nation as we disregard M.L. King’s desire that we judge each other based on character content, not skin color. We are now reduced to counting each other not as Americans but, what kind of American.
Government schools and employers now routinely ask, “What race are you and/or your children?” Has no one noticed that these questions are divisive, intrusive, and obnoxious? Like the sheep in Congress, we allow these impositions with barely a peep.
Too many of those we depend on to protect us from tyranny have the attitude that, “Oh well, it’s just our freedom and the trashing of our Constitution…nothing serious.”
When will Congress stand up to the Supreme Court?
Comments on this or any other Collins Report essay can be sent to kcoachc “at” gmail.com
Voluntary judicial tyranny: Congress can over rule the Supreme Court but won’t
09/05/2009
By Bruce Karlson
Last week, we looked at the actual language which should curtail the tyrannical power afforded the US Supreme Court. Supreme Court rulings are only binding “…with such exceptions and under such regulation as the Congress shall make.” (Section 111, Article 2).
Congress has never availed itself of its duty to restrain an activist Court.
Congress failed the first test and has continued ever since: In 1803 under John Marshall, the Court denied relief to William Marbury based on its finding that the Judicial Act of 1789 was unconstitutional. The Congress, apparently pleased that it had won this minor case, left Chief Justice John Marshall’s encroachment (nullifying its law) unchallenged.
Until 1954, this principle was left to fester, and fester it did.
Enter Earl Warren and Thurgood Marshall. It took 150 odd years for Congressional disinterest in the sanctity of its prerogatives to metastasize. The cancer was unchecked and spreading. One must understand that the Founders were, to a man, aligned against one branch encroaching on the delegated powers of another.
There was particular fear of Judiciary Branch incursions. The Founders may have believed that lawyers were men of principle who would decline to meddle.
It should be noted that, in 1832, Marshall’s court ruled against Andrew Jackson, who disregarded the ruling with impunity.
The 1954, ruling in the Brown v. Board of Education case, however, was never seriously challenged, as most Americans were either uninterested or thought that blacks deserved relief. Amazingly, there was no muscular legal challenge. FDR’s Southern racist Democrats in the House and the Senate moaned, groaned and threatened but really never took on the Court. Pusillanimity apparently still ruled in the Congress.
In short order, we had judges mandating school bus routes and assigning schools by virtue of “racial balance”.
Mrs. Smith’s protestations that she did not want her eight year old going to school fifteen miles away meant nothing.
The fruit of that decision was unending and often produced conflicting “civil rights” decrees, all a function of judicial whim. Meanwhile, the treasury is emptied, lives are uprooted, and the idea that “some animals are more equal than others” is accepted.
We have all witnessed the mess that unctuous judges have wreaked on the nation as we disregard M.L. King’s desire that we judge each other based on character content, not skin color. We are now reduced to counting each other not as Americans but, what kind of American.
Government schools and employers now routinely ask, “What race are you and/or your children?” Has no one noticed that these questions are divisive, intrusive, and obnoxious? Like the sheep in Congress, we allow these impositions with barely a peep.
Too many of those we depend on to protect us from tyranny have the attitude that, “Oh well, it’s just our freedom and the trashing of our Constitution…nothing serious.”
When will Congress stand up to the Supreme Court?
Comments on this or any other Collins Report essay can be sent to kcoachc “at” gmail.com