You could say the Civil War determined that the federal government was the ultimate authority. Decisions by unelected judges in the last hundred years eroded the Bill of Rights to the point where a "right to privacy" not found in the Constitution sanctioned the Nazi doctrine of "eugenics" and resulted in the new Holocaust murder of the unborn. A former KKK member appointed to the Supreme court by FDR wrote the majority opinion that justified incarceration of Japanese American citizens without due process in violation of the 5th Amendment. The same Justice found a "separation of Church and State" which did not appear in the Constitution and undermined the 1st Amendment freedom of religion to the point that a lawsuit by a single agnostic who was personally offended by a Christian Cross led to the order by a federal judge to bulldoze a Korean War memorial.
This was the first line of the OP:
There are several momentous events that altered the America envisioned by our Founders.
And not for the better.
Yup.....you mentioned a number of 'em.
But....if you'd like to do that, I hope you go back very near the start:
The question is where the Constitution, the law of the land, the only set of laws that the people of this nation have agreed to be governed by,
states that the Supreme Court has power over the executive or the legislative branches?
It says no such thing.
The authority for same does not exist.
The glaring, and momentous, mistake on the part of the Founders, was the
Judicial (
Supreme Court and lower Courts)
Branch of the government.
Before any excuse for the error is mounted , it should be noted that
the Constitution does not provide for what is called ‘judicial review,’ nor is the concept found in English law.
In Marbury vs Madison, John Marshall accomplished the most significant theft in our political history.
I am not an expert by any stretch of the immagination.
But Robert Bork did address this in his book The Tempting of America.
He states that Marbury decision was necessary....
Not that I take that as gospel......but Bork was always pretty good in his analysis.
That aside....you are correct...judical review isn't called out in the consitution. I think Bork argues that what the court does now goes way beyond what Marshall states.
What I applaud is that you are raising the issue.
Most GOP are CLUELESS on this issue and it is important !!!!!
I'm a big fan of Bork.....and he is certainly more versed on the issue than I am.
But if the Founders had intended it......
“If the framers—the authors and, most important, the ratifiers of the Constitution—had decided to grant the power, one would expect to see it, like the analogous presidential veto power, not only plainly stated but limited by giving conditions for its exercise and by making clear provision for Congress to have the last word. It appears that
the framers mistakenly envisioned the power as involving merely the application of clear rules to disallow clear violations, something that in fact rarely occurs.” Professor Lino Graglia,
https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/uploads/documents/0817946020_1.pdf
A series of essays, written under the name ‘Brutus,’ warned of exactly the situation we find ourselves in today:
“…they have made the judges
independent, in the fullest sense of the word.
There is no power above them, to controul any of their decisions. There is no authority that can remove them, and they cannot be controuled by the laws of the legislature. In short, they are independent of the people, of the legislature, and of every power under heaven. Men placed in this situation will generally soon feel themselves independent of heaven itself.”
Brutus, March 20, 1788
Anti-Federalist Papers: Brutus #15
And the fears were founded.
"At the establishment of our Constitutions, the judiciary bodies were supposed to be the most helpless and harmless members of the government. Experience, however, soon showed in what way they were to become the most dangerous; that the insufficiency of the means provided for their removal gave them a freehold and irresponsibility in office; that their decisions, seeming to concern individual suitors only, pass silent and unheeded by the public at large; that these decisions nevertheless become law by precedent, sapping by little and little the foundations of the Constitution and working its change by construction before any one has perceived that that invisible and helpless worm has been busily employed in consuming its substance. In truth, man is not made to be trusted for life if secured against all liability to account." --Thomas Jefferson to A. Coray, 1823. ME 15:486
But......as strong President can poke his finger in their eye!
“Jefferson: to “consider the judges the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions [is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy.”
Jackson: “The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges, and on that point the President is independent of both.”
Lincoln: “I
f the policy of the government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court . . . the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their Government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.” First Inaugural Address
Franklin Roosevelt: Proposed speech stating that if the Supreme Court should invalidate a certain New Deal measure, he would not “stand idly by and... permit the decision of the Supreme Court to be carried through to its logical inescapable conclusion.” Quoted in Kathleen M. Sullivan et al., “Constitutional Law,” pg. 20– 24 (15 ed., 2004).
I think there needs to be clarrification.
I do believe the SCOTUS has the duty to declare laws unconstitutional.
Now, what that means to the other two bodies is that they consider what has been rendered and decide if they agree or not (and they should have a very very good reason not to line up with the court).
The SCOTUS can't take a case and make something out of it.
Roe should never have happened.
And Earl Warren (one man - one vote) was one of the worst things to ever happen to the court.
Roosevelt tried to get the court to go his way through his infamous court packing scheme. The court kept blocking New Deal measures and it pissed him off.
How, exactly, they interact I don't know.
What I do know is that the Court does way to much anymore.
"Now, what that means to the other two bodies is that they consider what has been rendered and decide if they agree or not (and they should have a very very good reason not to line up with the court). "
First of all, when the Congress writes a law, it has a duty to judge it as constitutional
And when the President considers signing it.....the same duty.
So when it gets to the Court, supposedly honorable men have already made that judgment. Those on the Court must then make a similar judgment, and be able to point to specific elements in the Constitution when they render a decision.
Now....if the Congressfolks, and the President can't be counted on to be honorable, and stick to the Constitution.....why should we assume that Justices are any more honorable?
My view is that the judicial decisions of the Supreme Court should be treated the same way Red and
Green lights are treated
in Rome......as merely a suggestion.
I recall some of this....but if you could include the source it would only help me be more educated.
And while we might not agree to the extent that the courts should have reach (in terms of enforcement).
I do think we agree:
1. The we currently allow them to create laws (Griswold....penumbra of rights) which they should not be doing.
2. Any law they reject should not then be used as "settled case law", but instead should be clarrified so that congress can then taylor the law to make it constitutional.
"settled case law"
There is no such thing.
The Supreme Court has overruled itself 125 times in its history, usually after much time had passed and public sentiment changed, or because new appointments to the Court caused an ideological shift on the bench itself.⁴
The Court has also been overruled by Congress passing new (and sometimes clarifying) laws 59 times, in areas widely ranging from tax law to immigration to education and crime.⁵
4.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia List_of_over-ruled_U-ed_States_Supreme_Court_decisions 5.
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia List_of_abro-gat-ed_Ued_States_Supreme_Court_decisions
I am not a fan of the bogus 'stare decisis' view.
Any decision must be based on the language of the Constitution.
Chief Justice Rehnquist states that, that
Justices and judges need be restricted to decisions in accord with the Constitution, not their personal views, here:
“The brief writer’s version seems instead to be based upon the proposition that federal judges, perhaps judges as a whole, have a role of their own, quite independent of popular will, to play in solving society’s problems
. Once we have abandoned the idea that the authority of the courts to declare laws unconstitutional is somehow tied to the language of the Constitution that the people adopted, a judiciary exercising the power of judicial review appears in a quite different light.
Judges then are no longer the keepers of the covenant; instead they are a small group of fortunately situated people with a roving commission to second-guess Congress, state legislatures, and state and federal administrative officers concerning what is best for the country. Surely there is no justification for a third legislative branch in the federal government, and there is even less justification for a federal legislative branch’s reviewing on a policy basis the laws enacted by the legislatures of the fifty states.”
https://lc.org/071218TheNotionofaLivingConstitution.doc.pdf