Lawrence Baum, writing for the Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court, comments that as many as seven of the seventeen post-Bill-of-Rights amendments can be understood as reversing SCOTUS deciisons. His list:
11th – Chisholm v. Georgia
13th and 14th – Dred Scott v. Sandford
16th – Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust Co.
19th – United States v. Anthony and Minor v. Happersett
24th – “numerous cases,” unlisted
26th – Oregon v. Mitchell
For what it’s worth…
Well, Captain Carrot did say “law or a Constitutional amendment undoing it.”
Congress and states constantly seek to circumvent Supreme Court rulings. Witness the bevy of anti-abortion laws that keep cropping up trying to find the loophole or just get in under what they think will pass Constitutional muster or just in the hopes that they have a different court which will reverse itself.
Democracy in action.
I guess what puzzles me is your take on judicial “activism”. Aren’t the courts explicitly there to act as a check-and-balance on the other branches of government? Aren’t courts like the one in Iowa doing their job? They are interpreting the Constitution. They act as a barrier on the tyranny of the majority (which is all too evident in our history). If the population of the US really wants something there are ways to undo the court’s decisions via amendments (which, as noted, have been done).
I am rather surprised that someone as steeped in law as you are seem to miss this very basic aspect of our form of government. I have no doubt you are very much aware of the above, just your take on it that it is somehow not as it is meant to be or should be is puzzling. I think it is working as intended even if I do not always like the results.
I remember that triangle diagram from junior high school social studies class, too - the check the legislative has on the judiciary is the power to change the law, if they don’t like a court ruling based on the law, and to amend the Constitution, if they don’t like a court ruling based on the Constitution. It seemed pretty simple at the time, along with the other checks and balances.
Btw, given his firm conviction to the contrary that judges should merely interpret, not make, law, I am very much looking forward to Bricker’s next staff report explaining the concept of “case law”.
Ditto that.
VT has a national reputation of being very liberal, and we can be, but there’s a strong Republican bent to a lot of VTers in that quasi-libertarian, “ok gov’t, don’t bother me and I won’t bother you” sort of way.
Also, while The population center of VT (Chittenden County) can lean very left, the rest of the state is much more rural and Republican. I always chuckle at the college kids or transplants to Burlington who only know the Progressive, liberal, VT when they get shocked that there are actually a large number of Republicans in the state with different political views.
Remember, we’re the state that elected Jim Jeffords to serve in Congress for over 30 years, and for a long time we had a Democrat, Republican, and Independent serving in the federal government together.
Er… yes.
That’s what I get for doing it from memory.
So Bricker, what DO you think is the right check and balance for when the peepul, in a burst of religous ferver, or anti gay sentiment, or post terrorism fear/patriotism pass a bad law?
Several years ago, in a debate with december, I posted this list of amendments and the Supreme Court cases they overturned:
Pssst. Piper? See post #61. (But thanks for Breedlove v. Suttles, which wasn’t referenced.)
Am I the only one who wishes that the words “republican”, “democrat”, “liberal” and “conservative” had never been invented so people wouldn’t just assume that because someone is in favor of A, they must also be in favor of B and against C and D?
It’s not so much that the labels are inherently bad, it’s that our political system favors the formation of two HUGE coalition political parties, with dozens, if not hundreds, of component factions within each one. There are prolife Dems and prochoice Dems, progay Dems and antigay Dems, racially-tolerant Dems and racist Dems, blue-collar Dems and corporatist Dems, socialist Dems and Third Way Dems. The official party platform is one thing, but the makeup of the party is another.
The Republicans’ bench is a little narrower, mostly because they really and truly have worked in the last 10 years or so to throw their moderate wing out. Their liberal wing was dead by the mid-90s. But even the Republicans are working on a coalition basis…we saw huge rifts between the Corporate Republicans, the Evangelical Republicans, the Paleo-conservative Republicans, and the Neo-conservative Republicans. Those rifts probably helped propel Obama to the White House, as they interacted and inspired shifts in the McCain campaign.
Really, though, it’s our winner-takes-all electoral setup that forces parties to be this “big-tent”. The Republican and Democratic parties are both artificially sustained by our electoral system.
