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> "It also seems to me that she may be spot-on WRT her understanding of the very framework of the U.S. Constitution. It vests all national lawmaking power in Article I, Section 8: In Congress, and only with respect to a rather small number of delegated powers. The rest — the bulk — of U.S. political power is retained by the States and the People thereof."

The problem with the 10th Amendment is there was no mechanism written into it to rectify federal overreach.

The USSC, specifically Anthony Kennedy, who incidentally had a mentor who was homosexual, based his ruling on the 14th Amendment to which he proceeded to read in his bias and twist to his fashion.

There is no check on Supreme Court Justices in reading what they will into the Constitution. And this lack of check traces all the way back to Marbury v. Madison to which subsequent rulings should have been challenged but were never of such significance in relation to other matters that energy was never expended. But nothing stands in the way of revisiting Marbury v. Madison today.

Counter arguments describing what is needed are to elect conservative presidents who will appoint conservative justices. No!

It was President Reagan that appointed Anthony Kennedy. It is said that Kennedy lied during his vetting process with Reagan's people one of whom was Mark Levin.

Therefore, electing a conservative president is no panacea.

What is needed is a series of amendments that restore and strengthen the States, and that restore the balance between the States and the Federal government.

But nothing stands in the way of revisiting Marbury v. Madison today.

So let's revisit it!

Marbury v. Madison (decided 24 February 1803 by a vote of 5 to 0, Chief Justice John Marshall writing for the Court) was the first Supreme Court case to apply the emergent doctrine of judicial review to a congressional statute.

In the process, it had to deal with a poisonous political landscape: The Federalist President John Adams lost his reelection to the Republican President Thomas Jefferson. To say there was bad blood between these political parties — and the two men personally at the time — would be a gross understatement.

One William Marbury had been appointed a justice of the peace for the District of Columbia under the Adams Administration, but his commission had not been delivered to him at the time of Jefferson's accession to presidential office. The Republican party, evidently in a frenzy of "retaliation" in their dispute with the Federalists over past offenses real or imagined, wanted to see that the commission was never delivered, without which Marbury could not be seated as a federal judge. The incoming Republican Secretary of State, James Madison, refused to deliver it.

So Marbury went straight to the Supreme Court, invoking the "original jurisdiction" language of Article III, Section 2:

In all cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be a Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction.

Marbury petitioned the Court to issue a writ of mandamus, compelling Madison to deliver his already signed-and-sealed commission.

Herbert A. Johnson, author of the article on Marbury v. Madison in The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court of the United States (1992 edition), explains what happened next:

In his opinion for the Court, Marshall held that Marbury was entitled to his commission and that Madison had withheld it from him wrongfully. Mandamus was the appropriate remedy at common law, but the question presented was whether it was available under Article III's grant of original jurisdiction to the Supreme Court. To decide the question, Marshall was required to compare the text of Article III with section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789, by which Congress authorized the mandamus writ. Finding that the statute conflicted with the Federal Constitution, Marshall considered it "the essence of judicial duty" ... to follow the Constitution. He concluded that "the particular phraseology of the Constitution of the United States confirms and strengthens the principle, supposed to be essential to all written constitutions, that a law repugnant to the constitution is void; and that courts, as well as other departments, are bound by that instrument.... [boldface added for emphasis]

Chief Justice Marshall was thus the first to articulate and validate the principle of judicial review at the federal level. At the same time, his opinion

...conceded that the federal government has only the limited authority conferred upon it by the terms of the Constitution; all other political power and sovereignty is reserved either to the states or to the people by the Tenth Amendment. Thus concepts of limited government most vigorously circumscribed the powers of the federal government at least before the Civil War.... [more bolds added]

[Since the Civil War, maybe not so much....]

However, as Johnson points out, "Chief Justice Marshall had always been careful to defer to the political branches — Congress and the president — when important matters of domestic and foreign policy were involved."

Indeed, the Constitution itself appears NOT to regard the Article III judiciary as a branch with a political role at all. How else to explain the fact that SCOTUS justices, and federal judges generally, enjoy lifetime appointment to office, subject only to "good behavior?"

But tell that to Justice Kennedy!!!

Dear Hostage, you wrote: "There is no check on Supreme Court Justices in reading what they will into the Constitution." So it seems. We despair at the lack of "push-back" against a runaway Court.

Actually, Congress itself has the powers to push back — but doesn't seem to have the appetite to use them. The first is the power of Impeachment. (Politically very messy and difficult). The second is its Article III, Section 2 power:

...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.

Needless to say, I haven't seen any Congressional "exceptionalizing" or "regulating" of SCOTUS in recent times. It would be difficult to repeal their past mischief; but it seems to me Congress can stop their future mischief — by limiting SCOTUS' appellate jurisdiction.

Must stop there for now. You raise another extremely important issue in your last, dear Hostage: the Article V Convention of the States, for the proposal of amendments to the Constitution that can structurally restore the original balance of powers, as envisioned by the Framers, as between the federal government and the sovereign states and the people thereof.

I'm all in with you on that. Hopefully, we will speak of this another time, soon.

Thank you ever so much, dear Hostage, for your outstanding essay/post!