Require A SCOTUS Supermajority To Overturn Laws
A supermajority of at least seven Supreme Court Justices should be required to overturn laws as unconstitutional. When a law is passed by Congress or a state legislature, and signed by a governor or the president, it has already been deemed Constitutional by all those who approved it. If the law is to be deemed unconstitutional, it shouldn’t be a close call. It should be obvious; hence the necessity for a supermajority.
From Slate’s Hive, among their readers’ best ideas on the How To Fix The Constitution.
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Well now there’s an interesting premise. Joe, you found this worthy of citing, do you believe it?
Whoever wrote this has obviously not been paying attention to many of the laws having been passed recently. The number of laws passed by “pro-life” legislators and those seeking to defend Christianity from imagined persecution that have been passed with absolutely no consideration for their constitutionality is far from insignificant.
For all intents and purposes, we have the same sort of rule operating in the Senate.
It is not enough to have a simple majority anymore…you need a “filibuster-proof” majority.
I think we’ve all seen how that turned out.
CJ is spot on.
Generally, I’m a fan of the notion of crowdsourcing and the hive mind, so I watched the Slate project with some interest. I was not very impressed with the results; the SCOTUS supermajority idea seemed most quote worthy.
I do believe our electoral decisions should be given greater weight, as Justice Roberts apparently agrees. But I don’t believe democracy can be boiled down to “majority rule” as it is all too often understood.
I also watch with some dismay as we claim to be the greatest democracy in the world yet we have little to no faith in our government as reflected in our elected officials and the bureaucracy built to administer it.
Naw….making it more difficult to strike down laws only supports the tyranny of the majority. What is great about how our system is supposed to work is that the Constitution protects the minority.
All one needs is to amend the constitution.
Or we have Presidents that do not place judges like Thomas, Scalia, Sotomayor, Ginsburg and others that are so far right or far left that they can not make a decision that is not politically motivated to protect their party.
More moderates that can rule from the cnter would have the same results in most cases as an amended consitution.
My understanding of the purpose of the judicial branch is to make sure that when laws are passed, they are checked against the rights guaranteed to by the Bill of Rights. For this we wanted to have LEGAL EXPERTS. Anyone can be a president, senator, or congressman. They could be illiterate racist monarchists if that’s what the people wanted to put in office. But that doesn’t mean they could then pass laws saying that black people can be slaves again, because ideally the Judicial branch would stop that.
Joe W., I’d like to challenge that Slate’s attempt was NOT true crowdsourcing. Asking for people to toss out ideas is only a start of the process, and editors picking favorites is NOT part of it at all. True crowdsourcing involves everyone vetting others’ ideas and collaboratively working towards something functional.
I keep using Linux as a baseline here. The open collaboration concept used to instigate, create, and then expand on those efforts is fascinating in and of itself and is how “crowdsourcing” is done.
Sorry everyone ..Something blew up in my post. Duplicated when it looked like it was not doing anything. Need a new computer.
The problem with a ‘true’ democracy: All the blonde-haired people have to pay all the taxes!