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Supreme Court
Ketanji Brown Jackson
Judicial Review

“having served as a public defender, she would be the only current justice who had spent any portion of her career defending citizens against the state rather than representing the state and its interests…. however, Judge Jackson’s confirmation would almost certainly prove problematic for the causes of preserving individual liberty and stemming the tide of encroaching government” - Acton

Discussion

Thu, 03/17/22

Lots of tsk tsking in the article about how SCOTUS has morphed into the powerful institution it is, which arguably never should have happened.

I don’t have a lot of patience for that. On judicial review and a powerful Supreme Court, a) It was almost certainly inevitable, b) we probably needed it. As much as I revere the Constitution and respect the founding fathers, they were human and clearly didn’t foresee the ways in which their vision was not scalable. That is, some things can’t work in a sprawling nation of 329 million that worked fine with 13 colonies along a single coast. Rapid transportation and instantaneous information also make a nation a different sort of beast.

Other than God, everything changes. The challenge is to make change as wise as we can, given our inability to see all (or even most?) consequences.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Fri, 03/18/22

It should be noted that in England, they have never really had a fixed Constitution, and hence the law moves along where Parliament and the courts move it. So the non-reaction to Marbury v. Madison is understandable beause those observing it had lived with that all their lives.

That noted, the genius of the Constitution is that it at least theoretically puts a fixed measuring point for the law, and if we find that it’s insufficient for modern life (and quite frankly I’m not convinced it’s not), we can amend it with a strong supermajority. In that light, the problem with judicial activism is that it makes the Constitution say things that it clearly does not, and it circumvents the entire purpose of the Constitution—to provide a fixed reference for law.

The second reason that Marbury was not so consequential and controversial, then, is that it wasn’t strictly judicial activism, but simply clarified what the Court believed the law ought to mean.

Regarding Biden’s pick, it is as I expected, someone who’s on the wrong side of the divide over what the Constitution means.

Aspiring to be a stick in the mud.