St. Louis CofCC Blog

(1) From the AP, and under the oh-so-enthusiastic glare of her home state’s Governor (above):

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. - Judicial independence is under attack from people who don’t understand that court rulings must be based on legality instead of popularity, former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said Monday.

Judicial independence is under attack from judges who don’t understand that court rulings must be based on legality instead of ideology, this writer says today. The 1954 “Black Monday” Brown v Board decision wasn’t based on any good legal reasoning, it was based on the nine members of the U.S. Supreme Court doing whatever they felt like doing.

O’Connor urged the nation’s governors to push for improved civics instruction in public schools that would help citizens appreciate the separation of powers among the executive, legislative and judicial branches.

(snip)

Assaults on judicial authority have surfaced around the country, O’Connor said, including efforts to strip the courts of jurisdiction over certain types of cases and to impeach federal judges.

Congressional supervision over the jurisdiction of Federal courts and Congressional impeachment of Federal judges are both in the Constitution for the United States of America, and are representative of one branch of government (Congress) checking another (Judiciary). To say that Congress has no checks on the Judiciary is as stupid as saying that the Judiciary shouldn’t declare Congressional acts unconstitutional on occasion.

In addition, judicial races are getting mired in nasty election tactics previously limited to executive and legislative campaigns, said Tom Phillips, former chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court.

“Judges are making more contentious rulings on policy issues than ever before,” Phillips told the governors.

That is because courts have taken on so much power by themselves, essentially to enact new policy, that they have become politicians. They can’t miss the pain without missing the dance.

(2) Arizona’s Senior U.S. Treacherer, the one whose Presidential campaign is in the tank, is trying to get out of the tank by making Federal pork barrel spending an issue. John McCain states that, as President, he would veto budgets with pork barrel spending and excessive earmarks, (something which the Democrats claimed they wanted to stop if they won control of the House and Senate last year), and he wants the line-item veto.

The trouble is, (speaking of the judiciary, Miss O’Connor), the Supreme Court knocked down the line-item veto for very good reason: Because it upsets the separation of powers between Congress and the President. If any President had item veto power over certain items, and ergo over certain Congressmen and Senators, he would also have a lot of personal power over their votes, and it would eviscerate, to borrow Miss O’Connor’s phrase, Congressional independence.

What’s more noteworthy here is that McCain’s soft or hard amnesty for illegal aliens would create tens of trillions of dollars of new spending obligations for the Federal government over several decades.