It is really disturbing that the Justices of the Supreme Court seem more interested in politics, the effect of overtrning a law that was a sham to begin with, than they are in interpreting the law as written, and exercising their Constitutional duty.
So if someone gets away with murder, they get away with murder, ya can’t bing the deceased back, right?
Really troublesome. I guess Roberts doesn’t pay attention to off-year elections like ‘10 and ‘14. Just presidential elections where they drag out the dead to vote.
Marbury v. Madison was an adroit high-wire political act that assumed the power of judicial review, but pulled a surprise switch at the end of the opinion in favor of the prevailing political party to preserve the power the Court had just appropriated to itself.
Dred Scott v. Sanford was an abomination of legal reasoning, but was intended to achieve the political goal of deciding the slavery issue once and for all. Ironically, it did more to foment the Civil War it was intended to prevent.
The Slaughterhouse Cases and Lochner v. New York were judicial codification of prevailing government/private industry economic policies not really rooted in Constitutional doctrine, and while the Slaughterhouse Cases have been eroded by the expansion of the Due Process Clauses, it completely gutted a clause of the Constitution that was intended to have legal effect, but now has none.
Lochner was abandoned as politically inexpedient when Justice Roberts completely changed years of personal judicial philosophy to side with FDR's "New Deal" in West Coast Hotel. He was clearly responding to the political pressure of FDR's "court packing scheme," not merely a matter of "judicial evolution."
United States v. Nixon was the last time the Court spoke as a Court, a unanimous 8-0 opinion, on a matter of Executive Authority. It was a case that needed a unanimous opinion, and we got one. Since then, the appointment process has become a political battleground, mostly driven by the Court's own decision in Roe v. Wade, another abomination of judicial reasoning and Constitutional interpretation. Because of that, what were once deferential appointments have become the bitter bone of contention between left and right in the U.S. Senate.
The result has become a highly polarized and politicized Court. The greatest example of this was Bush v. Gore,. This may have been the most important case the Court has decided in the past 50 years, for the reason that in effect, the Supreme Court of the United States selected the President. It was a case that begged for a unanimous decision, and in order to heal political divisiveness the country needed a unanimous decision. Instead, it was a very predictable 5-4 vote. Because it was a narrow vote on partisan lines, the left will always claim it was political. It was the right decision, but it's value was lost because it was also a political one.
The Court continues to be a political battleground today. Both political parties are hovering like vultures over the not-yet carcass of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wondering whether she will be replaced by Eric Holder, or whether a Republican might instead appoint a real jurist.
I see no end in sight, and the political analysis has done much to damage the Court's credibility as a neutral and objective arbiter of the law.