GONZALES UPDATE Email from C.J. Wilkie

Human Events Online ^ | July 6, 2005 | C.J. Wilkie

[Vicomte13]

"Tell me, what else was the USSC created for if not to be the final arbiter of the constitution. Why did the founders create the 3rd branch of government for if it has no function?"

To do the same things as the House of Lords or the old Privy Council in England: to be the final decider of cases and controversies. The Law Lords do not have the power to overturn acts of Parliament, nothing in the Common Law did.
The US Constitution and system embraced the Common Law of England, which had been the system in the US before the Revolution. Judicial review of acts of the legislature, to overturn them based on constitutionality, has never been the power of the very highest courts in England, and is not today. And such judicial review override of Congressional Acts is not in the Constitution either. The Supreme Court made it up out of thin air in Marbury v. Madison. There was no precedent for it, at all. Not in the Common Law. Not in the colonies. Not in the Constitution.

The USSC was created to be the US Law Lords, the Supreme Court, with final jurisdiction over cases and controversies. There is no "case or controversy" against the Congress for using its power to legislate, or at least there was not until 1803...which is a good 16 years after the USSC was created. It has assumed that purpose (and did so for very political reasons, at the first change of political power from party to party in US history, with the USSC taking up a political role to try and judicially save the bacon of the politically defeated Federalists, by the way), but it was not created to have it.

[pillbox_girl]

Wait and see. In the dark days of the Clinton presidency, he appointed gun-grabbing activists to the Supreme Court. My votes helped put George Bush in the Oval Office in 2000, and keep him there in 2004. If Bush appoints another gun-grabbing activist to the Supreme Court, it will really make me wonder why I bothered. And that will affect how I vote in 2006. And there are a lot of Second Ammendment voters out there who are thinking exactly the same thing.

[wardaddy]

If you kill a Fed park ranger, DEA agent, or BOP hack then you will be charged Federally with murder.

That was my point.

As to the SCOTUS nuances, we shall see. Declaring abortion murder under Fed Criminal codes Title 18 is not the only course to declare the procedure illegal at the Federal label. SCOTUS likewise has no problem imposing this on the states should they wish. Many issues from forced busing to gun rights enfringement to about anything else I care about has been forced on the States. Reversing that will take a strong willed conservative court and activism and that doesn't bother me in the least.