BDBoop
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Our Supreme Court has lost its honor - Roger Simon - POLITICO.com
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It looks to me like there are two separate and distinct issues to discuss. First, the SCOTUS placed themselves above the other two branches, and second, they are using said power in a corrupt fashion.
The greatest power the justices have is carved into the marble of the Supreme Court Building and gilded in gold: It is emphatically the province and duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.
These are the words of John Marshall, the fourth U.S. chief justice, written in 1803. His decision established forever that the Supreme Court had the right to uphold or strike down laws passed by Congress.
Nowhere in the Constitution is the Supreme Court given this power. The Supreme Court took it in a 4-0 decision. (There were only six members on the court at the time and two were sick.)
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We realized they were human beings with political opinions, but we expected them to put those opinions aside.
And then came 2000 and the courts 5-4 decision that made George W. Bush the president of the United States. The decision was nakedly political. The case didnt just scar the Courts record, Jeffrey Toobin wrote in The New Yorker, it damaged the Courts honor.
Its honor has never fully recovered. Our current court is led by Chief Justice John Roberts, who was appointed by Bush in 2005 after having worked on Bushs behalf in Florida in 2000.
The signature of the Roberts Court, Toobin wrote, has been its eagerness to overturn the work of legislatures. This is hardly conservative doctrine but today, politics trumps even ideology. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the court gutted the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law which amounted to a boon for Republicans.
It looks to me like there are two separate and distinct issues to discuss. First, the SCOTUS placed themselves above the other two branches, and second, they are using said power in a corrupt fashion.