Replies

She might read Marbury v Madison. It also may be of note that opinions of the Supreme Court are enforced by the Executive Branch, with all the force needed. Brown v Bd of Education is an example.

There are opinions we agree with and those we don’t. But I think there are far more we agree with.

A written Constitution is what distinguishes us from other nations. It preserves our liberties. Some institution has to have the final interpretation of its content. That task falls on the Supreme Court.

If you think the Court is too liberal, then don’t elect a liberal as President. The next will fill at least one vacancy in the first term.

Justice Marshall, in Marbury, said the exact opposite of what you claim.

The whole judicial supremacist fallacy is built on one sentence in Marbury, twisted to mean the exact opposite of what it actually means, in context.

"I do not forget the position assumed by some that constitutional questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court, nor do I deny that such decisions must be binding in any case upon the parties to a suit as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the Government upon vital questions affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made in ordinary litigation between parties in personal actions 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."

-- President Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address

"It is a very dangerous doctrine to consider judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions. It is one which would place us under the despotism of an oligarchy."

- Thomas Jefferson