Tag Archives: Supreme Court

Good-bye, Supreme Court. Hello, Super Legislature.

Posted on by

President Biden doesn’t think we should expand the Supreme Court because it would “politicize” it. Pick a metaphor. That train has already left the station? That ship has sailed? That horse has left the corral? Republican senators destroyed the notion that the Court isn’t political when they refused to let Obama appoint a justice almost one year before the 2016 election and then rammed one through in 2020 when people were already voting.

The president needs to review recent events. Mehdi Hasan of MSNBC summarizes while asking “who died and made the Supreme Court a legislature?”

… It’s one of Republicans’ longest-running talking points: “Don’t legislate from the bench.”

Now that Republican appointees are a supermajority on the Supreme Court, you would think that this majority would steer clear of anything that might look like it was writing laws and thereby undermining the people’s representatives in Congress.

But you’d be wrong.

Today’s conservative justices are happily imposing their reactionary legislative vision on America, not just by interpreting laws, but by effectively rewriting them, in order to implement unpopular policies that could never get passed through Congress. Separation of powers be damned.

Take some of the biggest, most divisive, most consequential issues in American life right now: student loan relief, climate change, voting rights, labor laws and gun control. Now the Supreme Court decides what happens on those issues. Not you. Not me. Not our elected representatives.

Like on Friday when the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that 43 million Americans would not receive student loan relief under President Joe Biden’s plan.

The conservatives ruled the program had not been explicitly approved by Congress in the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act, or HEROES Act.

But that law allows the Education Department to “waive or modify” financial assistance programs “as the Secretary deems necessary” in a national emergency.

Like the Covid pandemic we were still in when Biden announced his plan last year.

In her dissent, liberal Justice Elena Kagan slammed her conservative colleagues, writing: “The result here is that the Court substitutes itself for Congress and the Executive Branch in making national policy about student-loan forgiveness.”

Got crippling student debt from predatory loans? Tough. The Supreme Court says you can’t get relief.

On climate change, the Supreme Court has undermined Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency twice in the last year alone.

In West Virginia v. EPA, a 6-3 majority ruled the EPA exceeded its authority by regulating carbon emissions from power plants. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority: “It is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme. 
 A decision of such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself.”

Except that Congress did explicitly give the EPA the authority to use the “best system of emission reduction” when it passed the Clean Air Act in the ’60s.

As Kagan put it in her dissent, “The Court will not allow the Clean Air Act to work as Congress instructed. The Court, rather than Congress, will decide how much regulation is too much.”

Then in May in Sackett v. EPA, Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority in a precedent-setting opinion that the Clean Water Act only allows the EPA to regulate wetlands that have “a continuous surface connection” to “waters of the United States.”

Except that’s not what the law says. The law applies to “all waters of the United States” and explicitly wetlands “adjacent” to those waters. But instead of applying the law as written, Alito just changed the meaning of the word “adjacent” to mean “adjoining.”

You want Congress to decide how to protect our air and water? Tough. The Supreme Court decides that now.

Next, look at voting rights, where in the last 10 years, the Supreme Court effectively rewrote the core protections of the historic Voting Rights Act, first passed by Congress in 1965.

Congress passed the VRA explicitly to force southern states with a history of disenfranchising Black  voters through seemingly neutral voting requirements to get approval from the federal government before they could implement any new voting laws.

This “preclearance” was such a crucial part of the VRA that Congress voted overwhelmingly to extend the preclearance provision in 1982 and again in 2006.

But in 2013, a 5-4 majority led by Roberts decided that voter suppression laws were no longer a problem in those states. That ruling in Shelby County v. Holder effectively voided the preclearance provisions that Congress had voted overwhelmingly to extend just seven years earlier.

In Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee in 2021, the 6-3 majority upheld an Arizona election law that imposed burdens upon Native Americans living on reservations because the majority felt the burdens alleged were “modest when considering Arizona’s ‘political processes’ as a whole.”

As Kagan noted in her dissent, “The Court has (yet again) rewritten—in order to weaken—a statute that stands as a monument to America’s greatness, and protects against its basest impulses.”

Do you want Congress to protect voting rights and stop racist rules from suppressing minority votes? Tough. The Supreme Court is writing the laws now.

Now look at labor rights, where this anti-worker, anti-union court has legislated from the bench to create new rights for corporations, and against their employees, in two major cases.

In 1935, Congress passed the National Labor Relations Act, which enshrined the right of workers to join unions and to organize orderly strikes. To resolve disputes between workers and employers, the law also established the National Labor Relations Board.

This court has hacked away at that system.

This happened most crucially in 2018 with Janus v. AFSCME, when the Roberts court struck down the long-standing practice of mandatory union “agency fees” being deducted from employees’ paychecks.

“There is no sugarcoating today’s opinion,” Kagan wrote in her dissent. “The majority overthrows a decision entrenched in this Nation’s law—and in its economic life—for over 40 years.”

You want Congress to protect labor rights? Tough. The Supreme Court has other policy ideas.

In the absence of much meaningful action by Congress, this Supreme Court has done more than any legislature to radically alter gun policy.

In Washington, Chicago and New York state, over more than a century, lawmakers passed tailored gun regulations, but in recent years, the Supreme Court has gutted them.

In 2008, in District of Columbia v. Heller, five justices struck down a Washington, D.C., handgun ban, deciding that the Second Amendment wasn’t about colonial militias but about the right of the average Joe to brandish a Glock.

In 2010, that ruling was extended to the rest of the country with McDonald v. Chicago.

Then in 2022, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the court went a step further and decided that the Second Amendment also says Americans are guaranteed a right to carry guns in public, contradicting New York’s century-old law requiring gun owners to show proper cause for doing so and obtain a license.

As liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it during oral arguments, describing the implications of a court stepping in on a state’s legal turf, “You’re asking us to make the choice for the legislature.”

The six conservative Supreme Court justices were more than happy to make that choice for the state Legislature. States only get to put limits on really dangerous things, like voting rights and abortion.

You want Congress to stop mass shootings? Tough. This Supreme Court is calling the shots.

Making the choice for the legislature — that’s exactly what this Supreme Court now does, on a regular basis, and on a range of key issues. It takes issues decided by the people’s representatives and then re-decides them in a manner that pleases the conservative supermajority on the bench. So an elected, and Democratic-controlled, Congress can write and pass a progressive law, but an unelected and very conservative Supreme Court can just rewrite it.

Confidently. Brazenly. Shamelessly.

These are not neutral judges. These are politicians in robes.

Unquote.

Too late for Hasan’s article, a radical judge appointed by the last president has issued an injunction that stops various parts of the Executive Branch from talking to social media companies on the ludicrous theory that right-wing voices are being censored. It may be the most ridiculous ruling yet from the recent batch of Republican federal judges.

It was 1869 when Congress and President Grant increased the Supreme Court from 8 to 9 justices. At the same time, they created 9 circuits or courts of appeal spread around the country, one for each Supreme Court justice to partly administer.

There are now 13 circuits and many more Americans, lawyers and cases. The Democrats should add 4 justices next time they hold the White House and both houses of Congress. Thirteen circuits, thirteen justices.

That will require at least 50 Democratic senators who are willing to ignore a Republican filibuster. Let the Republicans complain that the Democrats are politicizing a Court that’s already political.

The Republicans on the Supreme Court Screw America Again

Posted on by

It was only this week that I learned there are wedding websites. I don’t mean the kind that tell you how to have the perfect wedding. I mean websites devoted to a specific wedding, i.e., the one you and your prospective spouse plan to have. A site for brides explains:

A wedding website provides a hub for important information regarding a couple’s big day. It can house venue details, dress code specifics, and your registry wishes. Plus, it provides a space to keep guests easily updated and to collect wedding RSVPs. But with a number of options out there, which are the best wedding websites?

Okay, that makes sense. We use the internet for a whole lot of stuff these days.

But if you’re not a web designer, how do you get a site for your wedding, something like, say, (don’t click on it) http://www.Mary_and_John_Are_Having_a_Wedding.org? Fortunately, there are lots and lots of companies that make it easy to do just that. If you visit the link above for brides, you’ll find this list:

8 Best Wedding Websites of 2023

The first one on the list, Joy, offers this:

  • Price: Free
  • No. of templates: 601
  • Custom domain? Yes, separate domain purchase required

So you can use the site for free, they have 601 designs to choose from, and if you want a designated domain name (like Mary_and_John_Are_Having_a_Wedding) you have to give them a nominal sum, maybe $20 a year.

As I said above, there are lots of companies that offer this service to people getting married. And it doesn’t look like there’s a lot of money to be made by doing so.

Yet, a woman in Colorado with a web design business called 303 Creative apparently decided that she wanted to begin offering this service. But wait! Wouldn’t that require her company to sell her services to prospective spouses who happen to be gay? Yes, it would.

Gay people are one of the “protected classes” referred to in federal and/or state laws. In particular, Colorado has a “public accommodations” law that says:

It is a discriminatory practice and unlawful for a person, directly or indirectly, to refuse, withhold from, or deny to an individual or a group, because of disability, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, marital status, national origin, or ancestry, the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, or accommodations of a place of public accommodation.

And a “place of public accommodation” includes any business that sells its services to the public.

So what? Well, the owner of 303 Creative claims to be the kind of non-Christian “Christian” who abhors the idea of gay marriage. She says she could never bring herself to sell her services to a gay couple. What to do?

A reasonable person might say to themselves, all right, given my particular (albeit peculiar) religious beliefs, I guess I’ll skip the wedding web design business. There are weddings I wouldn’t want to handle and I don’t want to break the law.

This is where the Alliance Defending Freedom enters the picture. (I don’t know if this Colorado woman contacted them or they contacted her — maybe they went looking for a web designer with a hatred for gay marriage — it doesn’t really matter.) Here’s what the Southern Poverty Law Center says about the ADF:

Founded by some 30 leaders of the Christian Right, the Alliance Defending Freedom is a legal advocacy and training group that has supported the recriminalization of sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ adults in the U.S. and criminalization abroad; has defended state-sanctioned sterilization of trans people abroad; has contended that LGBTQ people are more likely to engage in pedophilia; and claims that a “homosexual agenda” will destroy Christianity and society.

ADF also works to develop “religious liberty” legislation and case law that will allow the denial of goods and services to LGBTQ people on the basis of religion. [ADF was] one of the most influential groups informing the [previous] administration’s attack on LGBTQ rights.

The ADF helped 303 Creative’s owner file a lawsuit to stop the state of Colorado from enforcing its public accommodation law against her, assuming that (1) she one day began offering wedding website design services, (2) a gay couple tried to buy her services, (3) she refused to sell to them and (4) the state of Colorado was interested enough to prosecute her.

Apparently, it’s an interesting legal question whether 303 Creative had “standing” to sue. Usually, you need to say you’ve suffered an injury in order to sue somebody. But the six reactionaries on the Supreme Court don’t worry much about details like that anymore. They decided the Dobbs forced-birth case in favor of doctors who said they might one day have patients who were upset after they had an abortion.

To make this long story shorter, 303 Creative’s owner sued Colorado in federal court; she lost; she appealed that decision; she lost again; and (as ADF hoped all along) the Supreme Court decided to accept the appeal, after which the Renegade Six decided in her favor. As usual it was 6-3. The majority’s main “justification” for voting that way was that making her accept a gay couple as customers would somehow interfere with her First Amendment right to free speech. Whatever.

Here’s some of Justice Sotomayor’s response to the Six’s radical decision (her dissent begins on page 33):

Five years ago, this Court recognized the “general rule” that religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage “do not allow business owners and other actors in the economy and in society to deny protected persons equal access to goods and services under a neutral and generally applicable public accommodations law”.

… Today, the Court, for the first time in its history, grants a business open to the public a constitutional right to refuse to serve members of a protected class. Specifically, the Court holds that the First Amendment exempts a website design company from a state law that prohibits the company from denying wedding websites to same-sex couples…. The Court also holds that the company has a right to post a notice that says “no [wedding websites] will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages”.

… “What a difference five years makes.” Around the country, there has been a backlash to the movement for liberty and equality for gender and sexual minorities. New forms of inclusion have been met with reactionary exclusion. This is heartbreaking. Sadly, it is also familiar. When the civil rights and women’s rights movements sought equality in public life, some public establishments refused. Some even claimed, based on sincere religious beliefs, constitutional rights to discriminate. The brave Justices who once sat on this Court decisively rejected those claims. 

Now the Court faces a similar test. A business open to the public seeks to deny gay and lesbian customers the full and equal enjoyment of its services based on the owner’s religious belief that same-sex marriages are “false.” The business argues, and a majority of the Court agrees, that because the business offers services that are customized and expressive, the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment shields the business from a generally applicable law that prohibits discrimination in the sale of publicly available goods and services.

That is wrong. Profoundly wrong…. The law in question targets conduct, not speech, for regulation, and the act of discrimination has never constituted protected expression under the First Amendment. Our Constitution contains no right to refuse service to a disfavored group….

The people of Colorado have adopted the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act… A public accommodations law has two core purposes. First, the law ensures “equal access to publicly available goods and services”…. For social groups that face discrimination, such access is vital…. Second, a public accommodations law ensures equal dignity in the common market. Indeed, that is the law’s “fundamental object”: “to vindicate ‘the deprivation of personal dignity that surely accompanies denials of equal access to public establishments.’

… Preventing the “unique evils” caused by “acts of invidious discrimination in the distribution of publicly available goods, services, and other advantages” is a compelling state interest “of the highest order”…

A public accommodations law does not force anyone to start a business, or to hold out the business’s goods or services to the public at large. The law also does not compel any business to sell any particular good or service. But if a business chooses to profit from the public market, which is established and maintained by the state, the state may require the business to abide by a legal norm of nondiscrimination.

In particular, the state may ensure that groups historically marked for second-class status are not denied goods or services on equal terms.
The concept of a public accommodation thus embodies a simple, but powerful, social contract: A business that chooses to sell to the public assumes a duty to serve the public without unjust discrimination….

The unattractive lesson of the majority opinion is this: What’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is yours. The lesson of the history of public accommodations laws is altogether different. It is that in a free and democratic society, there can be no social castes. And for that to be true, it must be true in the public market. For the “promise of freedom” is an empty one if the Government is “powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of [one person] will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of [another]”. Because the Court today retreats from that promise, I dissent.

Republicans outnumber Democrats by six to three on the Supreme Court. With even five votes, they can do whatever they want. One way to fix this problem is to expand the Court. We now have thirteen federal judicial districts, instead of nine. We should have at least thirteen justices on the Court to handle the additional workload and, more importantly, restore some sanity to the institution. Together, the Congress and the President can add justices. We need to keep a Democrat in the White House and add motivated Democrats to Congress. Otherwise, the renegades will keep whittling away at our society. There’s nothing to stop them as long as they have enough votes.

If You’ve Got At Least Five Votes, You Can Do Whatever You Want

Posted on by

The reactionary 2/3 of the Supreme Court announced today that the kind of affirmative action that favors black college applicants, simply because they’re black, is no longer legal. That’s not what earlier Supreme Courts thought, but legal precedent doesn’t matter if you’ve got enough votes.

Race-based affirmative action has always been controversial and even with the Court’s 6-3 decision today, what’s legal and what isn’t will remain murky. The Court now says race can be a factor in college admissions if it played a sufficiently significant role in the applicant’s life. Obviously, this isn’t the end of the matter.

The decision (full text here) talks a lot about the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. That’s the one that says “no state shall … deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”. The amendment was adopted after the Civil War to protect black Americans, especially former slaves, from discrimination.

But the notion of “equal protection” is vague. When a college admits somebody based on their athletic prowess, are applicants with no athletic skills being equally protected? How about the children of alumni or university staff? Are applicants whose parents never went to college or don’t work at the university in question equally protected?

I was trying to answer this question for myself when the internet led me to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It famously prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin. That seems to be a clearer, although not necessarily clear, rule to follow than the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. In fact, Wikipedia says the Civil Rights Act was enacted in order to clarify the meaning of “equal protection”.

Looking to see what today’s decision said about the Civil Rights Act, I found a concurring opinion from Justice Gorsuch (a prominent reactionary). This is what Gorsuch says:

For some time, [Harvard and the University of North Carolina] have decided which applicants to admit or reject based in part on race. Today, the Court holds that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not tolerate this practice. I write to emphasize that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not either. [p. 107]

… a clear rule emerges. Title VI prohibits a recipient of federal funds from intentionally treating one person worse than another similarly situated person because of his race, color, or national origin. It does not matter if the recipient can point to “some other … factor” that contributed to its decision to disfavor that individual… It does not matter if the recipient discriminates in order to advance some further benign “intention” or “motivation”. [p. 109]

Gorsuch concludes that since the Civil Rights Act doesn’t mention, for example, athletic prowess or whether your parents ever went to college, it’s fine to discriminate against lousy athletes and applicants whose parents only finished high school. That makes a certain amount of sense, although there are devils in the details.

If you want to hire somebody to teach Chinese, it is discrimination if you favor somebody born in Shanghai over somebody born in Iowa? If the drama club is casting Hamlet, is it discrimination to lean toward a woman playing Ophelia instead of a man? The blunt language of the law suggests it would be illegal to do so.

Presumably, a college can still favor an applicant who grew up in Alabama or Compton over one from Darien, Connecticut, or Malibu. That’s one way to indirectly and haphazardly consider race in college admissions.

But this is why we have legislators and judges, to clarify such matters (it’s really too bad so many of them are Republicans).

Even though Gorsuch thinks the Civil Rights Act presents a clear rule — not simply a clearer one — the six reactionaries included this exception in their decision:

The United States [government] contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies….This opinion … does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.

In other words, our military academies may continue to factor race into who they admit, the rationale for this exception being that the officer corps shouldn’t be a lot whiter than the regular troops. Yet having a racially diverse officer corps is just one of those “other factors” or “benign intentions or motivations” that Gorsuch says are irrelevant.

Is having a racially diverse student body a factor to be considered when deciding who gets to attend and graduate from our nation’s most prestigious universities? Apparently not.

So much for right-wing consistency (but, after all, they have the votes).

PS: The Court also issued a decision today in a case involving a Christian who worked for the post office. When the post office began making deliveries on Sundays, this employee told his supervisor that he couldn’t work that day of the week because of his religious beliefs (he sought a religious “accommodation”).

With Groff unwilling to work on Sundays, USPS made other arrangements. During the peak season, Sunday deliveries that would have otherwise been performed by Groff were carried out by the rest of the [local] staff, including the postmaster, whose job ordinarily does not involve delivering mail. During other months, Groff ’s Sunday assignments were redistributed to other carriers assigned to the [region]. Throughout this time, Groff continued to receive “progressive discipline” for failing to work on Sundays. Finally, he resigned.

He then sued the post office. The Supreme Court unanimously sent the case back to a lower court for further proceedings. But weren’t the non-Christian employees forced to work on Sunday being discriminated against for not being Christians? Wouldn’t their treatment violate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlaws discrimination based on religion? Thank heavens we have distinguished jurists to answer these questions.

The Right Had a Plan and It Worked

Posted on by

Here’s an eight-minute video that explains the origin of today’s reliably extreme right-wing Supreme Court. (The same method is now being applied in other parts of the culture, like business and education).

Warning: The sound on the video comes on at full blast. Why do they do that?

A Plan To Increase Majority Rule

Posted on by

Most bills introduced in Congress never make it out of committee, let alone receive a vote on the House or Senate floor. But even when a member of Congress knows their bill is doomed, they can still have a good reason for introducing it. For one thing, it can identify a problem and let people know how to fix it. 

Earlier this week, Rep. Sean Casten, a Democrat who represents the 6th district of Illinois southwest of Chicago, submitted two bills as part of what he called “A Common Sense Vision for American Democracy”. As part of the same package, he proposed a resolution suggesting an amendment to the Constitution.

He gave a very good speech explaining why he did this. He argued that the principal reason Congress rarely accomplishes anything important, even when it’s something favored by most voters, is that minority rule is built into our system of government. It’s a rather obvious point, but worth repeating: if majority rule was a bigger feature of our government, it would be easier for our government to do things the majority of us want our government to do.

I recommend reading or watching Rep. Casten’s whole speech (although he attributes a point of view to his Republican colleagues that they don’t share). Here’s some of it:

People say: Why is it that people in this institution are failing to do things that are overwhelmingly popular?

When we see those little polls that say Congress has a 20 percent approval rating, that should be a red light that we got to fix things…. If we are going to do that, we have to first acknowledge some unpleasant, if self-evident, truths.

First of all, 
 our Founders actually weren’t perfect. They weren’t Moses. They weren’t Jesus. They were fallible people just like us….

The second thing we got to acknowledge is that our Founders didn’t actually think the Constitution was perfect….

The third thing, and this is the one that I think is most important for us here today, is that our Founders did not understand democracy nearly as well as we do…. They were an amazing group of people. They did an amazing thing, but we have 233 years of wisdom that they did not have….

What’s clear, the answer to that question, ‘‘why is it that we can’t do things that the majority of the American people want?’’ is in large part because while our Founders paid lip service to democracy 
 they didn’t trust that people in a fully democratic society could elect a President, so they created the Electoral College. They created the Senate expressly to frustrate the will of the majority….

When it was founded, the biggest state had 10 times the population of the smallest state. Today, it is up to almost 70. So, we have massively disenfranchised huge numbers of 
 people because of a structure that was designed to disenfranchise large, but not as big, numbers of people.

We kick a bill out of here, you can get 50 votes in the Senate with people representing 17 percent of the United States population.

When our voters ask us why we can’t get things done that are supported by the will of the majority, it is built into our system.

And then finally, our Founders created the Supreme Court with largely no checks and balances — lifetime appointments, no ethics obligations….

Remember, Marbury v. Madison that significantly expanded the power of the Court relative to the legislative branch came after the Constitution was signed. This is a different structure than what they contemplated, and effectively gave the Supreme Court not the ability to write laws but darn close to it, because you get one Supreme Court Justice that flips the majority, and all of a sudden, you can say that our work here, all the good work we put in [in Congress], is unconstitutional and overturned …That is not majoritarian….

In a healthy democracy, we should all be competing for that mythical center of the electorate. We shouldn’t be sitting there and saying: I have a 20-year plan to stack the Court with Justices who will agree with me to overturn the will of the American people.

We shouldn’t be sitting there saying: Well, I can control the Senate if I just find a couple of senate seats in a couple of low-population states with cheap TV markets….

We will be healthier, both of our parties, if we commit ourselves to the idea, as Jefferson said, that if we are not representing the will of the majority, because no form of government ever consistently does, let’s fix it so that we do, which brings me to the three bills we introduced today.

The first bill is a constitutional amendment to add 12 national at-large Senators….Imagine what would happen if 10 percent of the Senate had an interest in representing the will of the American people….It would make it that much harder for them to filibuster a good bill that comes out of here because why would you filibuster something that is supported by the majority of the American people?

It would also, by adding 12 senators, add 12 more electors [to the Electoral College] who represented the popular vote. That would reduce the number of scenarios where we could have the popular vote winner lose an election to the electoral vote winner. That is the first bill.

The second one is to expand this House, and in the next Census, 2030, say let’s go out and look at the smallest State in the Union and say the size of that State is going to set the size of a congressional district, because if we are the House of Representatives, we should make sure that all of us represent as close as we can the same number of people.

The House hasn’t grown since 1911. The population of the United States has grown three and a half times since 1911…. So let’s expand the House and make us more representative. If we did that based on the last Census, that would add something like 130 seats to this House [e.g. California would have 67 representatives instead of 52; Florida would have 37 instead of 28].

Again, that would add more votes to the Electoral College. It would make [presidential elections] more representative.

And then the third bill … is to restore the Supreme Court to their Article III responsibilities….Article III of the Constitution lays out the scope of the Supreme Court. It says that they are responsible for matters of admiralty law, maritime law, matters relating to ambassadors, disputes between the States, and appellate jurisdictions the Congress may see fit to provide from time to time.

If we have a Court that is consistently not fulfilling the will of the American people, if we have a Court that is consistently encroaching on our power here in this Chamber, overturning our judgments and what we do, it is in our power to 
 reduce their appellate jurisdiction…. If the courts are going to say that a law we passed is unconstitutional, we will select from a pool of circuit court judges, appellate court judges, at random, and it will take at least 70 percent of them to overturn a bill…It takes two-thirds for us to overturn a veto, right? Let’s hold them to the same standard….

Also, it would eliminate the shadow docket. Why do we allow ourselves to live in a world where the Supreme Court can just decide to rule on something and not even explain it? Let’s get rid of the shadow docket.

I am not perfect. You aren’t perfect, Mr. Speaker. None of us in this room are perfect. Our Founders weren’t perfect, but we are perfectible, and we have a job that affords us the opportunity and the responsibility to make our government a little bit better, a little bit more responsive, a little bit more democratic.

Unquote.

It may take a long time to do the kind of things Rep. Casten (and others) want to do. It may never happen. But more of us should understand why the president, Congress and the Supreme Court aren’t as representative as they should be. Maybe more of us will vote for politicians who want more majority rule. Maybe one day somebody we vote for will do something about it.

Next time, however, I’ll offer a corrective to Rep. Casten’s speech. He may have been giving his Republican colleagues the benefit of the doubt, but he claimed they believe in something they really don’t.