In Why is the Supreme Court Supreme?, the historian Thomas Reeves argues that the Supreme Court works pretty well as it is, or as well as it is likely to. Responding to the question “Why should the American people be ruled by nine unelected lawyers?”, for example, he argues that
every nation and organization needs a person or a body of people that can settle issues once and for all, a place where, as Harry Truman put it, the buck stops. The alternative is chaos often followed by violence. While Americans want nothing to do with kings or emperors, we, too, need a source of final authority. Think of the mayhem that might well have occurred following the election of 2000 without a Supreme Court to halt the shenanigans going on in Florida.
The Court continues to play this role because it works, and we are a practical people. We’ve had our Civil War and are now content (at least the vast majority of us) to work together as a single nation under law, as defined by the Supreme Court.
Reeves, a conservative Catholic and biographer of JFK and Fulton Sheen, contributed Not So Christian America to First Things (it’s behind the wall).
July 9th, 2010 | 9:08 am
I don’t know…we are one sudden death away from the Court becoming the chief dispencer of socialist largesse.
I don’t think this is what the framers intended.
July 9th, 2010 | 1:43 pm
Thank you, Supremes, for settling “once and for all” the Roe v Wade case of 1973. Thanks, a bit over 100 years previous to that, for affirming that black people can be property in Dred Scott.
Thanks again, Supremes, for informing us in Casey v Pennsylvania (believe that’s what it was called) that each of us must be left free even under the law to define our own meanings of love, life, and the universe. Which of course, in this case, meant free to kill others (via abortion) to satisfy our own personal meaning of life and being.
Etc etc. Really works well, doesn’t it?
July 9th, 2010 | 3:55 pm
All governments must have someone who has the final word. Our system was designed to give the legislative branch the final word on some matters, the executive on others, and the Supreme Court on others. It was also designed to give states the final word on some matters and the federal government the final word on other matters.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has invaded and usurped authority which the founders gave to the other two branches in the federal government or to the states. In doing so, the Court has done inestimable damage to the constitution and to our entire system of divided government with checks and balances.
No better example exists of the tragic and dire consequences of this usurpation that the line of cases which include Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Lawrence v. Texas. The second, in particular, has poisoned our process to the point that our national politics is now divided into extremes, with the much needed middle ground having been entirely eroded. Instead of allowing state governments to continue to establish policy in this area based on two elected branches, the Court ended all debate and all means of developing consensus solutions. This, in turn, has led to a growing rift in the body politic in much the same way that the Court’s Dred Scott decision led to a regional rift.
So, yes, the Court works, but its work over the second half of the last century has done much more harm than good to the health of our system.
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