[billflax]

Per Roberts ruling, America's defining principle is no longer laws, but elections.

[Travis McGee]

“You seem ... to consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions; a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so. They have, with others, the same passions for party, for power, and the privilege of their corps.... Their power [is] the more dangerous as they are in office for life, and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control. The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever hands confided, with the corruptions of time and party, its members would become despots. It has more wisely made all the departments co-equal and co-sovereign within themselves.”

Thomas Jefferson, 1820.

But the remedy is right there in the plain English of the Constitution, if we can blow away the smokescreens of our priestly castes of lawyerly Mandarins:

In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.

"...with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make."

[atc23]

Yes, and elections won by those best prepared to pander and promise to those least likely to embrace American ideals.

[OneWingedShark]

Per Roberts ruling, America's defining principle is no longer laws, but elections.

I would go a step further and say not even elections, but bureaucracies redefining and selectively applying things to get their desired results (the Judiciary falls into that category, what with its sacred cow of precedence).

[The_Reader_David]

It is not Chief Justice Roberts who is at fault, but the congress and state legislatures long ago that gave us the Sixteenth Amendment. Once Congress was granted the power to tax incomes without restraints on the form of the tax (as, for instance, requiring it be levied as a fixed percentage of income regardless of source or amount, or forbidding the imposition of a higher rate of taxation on any class of persons on any basis other than the aggregate amount of income earned), the possibility of Congress doing exactly what it did in the Obamacare law — laying an income tax on one class of persons while exempting others has been constitutional.

I recall a story about the eminent mathematician Kurt Goedel, who when he was becoming a U.S. citizen in the late 1940’s was asked by the immigration judge whether the U.S. Constitution would permit the establishment of a Nazi-style tyranny. The more socially adept Einstein had to restrain Goedel from explaining exactly how a tyranny could, in fact be established, within the restraints of the Constitution. I wonder whether Pelosi and her crew of wreckers didn’t make the same discovery as Goedel in this regard. As both Daniel Webster and Chief Justice Marshall noted, the power to tax is the power to destroy, and tyrants wield destruction as their mode of rule.

[Tzimisce]

Oh yeah?

Well you’re a racist.

-educated, well thought out liberal come back

[BuckeyeTexan]

FReepmail me to subscribe to or unsubscribe from the SCOTUS ping list.