The good news is that as slogans go, the call for common people to vote to rein in rogue courts rings a little phony. Every judge in these states—indeed, 87 percent of judges nationwide—regularly stands for election. Jurists in Montana can already be recalled for incompetence or unfitness. And judges everywhere can be impeached for misconduct.Go forth and read, you policy wonk, you.
The problem for anti-court activists is that Americans can't be trusted to fire judges. That's why these self-styled Jimmy Stewarts quickly move to divisive wedge issues. To rile up voters, they demand vengeance for a familiar litany of hot-button decisions on cases involving immigration, school vouchers, zoning laws, criminal sentences, and gun control. Underneath this populist clothing, there's an awful lot of back-room politics.
Jul 29, 2006
a codependent judiciary
Bert Brandeburg tallies this fall's various measures to shackle state courts.
Most Americans have no idea what the judicial system is, how it works, or why it exists. We're constantly hearing about "activist judges" from people who've never bothered to read these judges' opinions themselves. Worse, the chronic short-term memory of the American public makes it impossible for people to know when these so-called "activist judges" are actually following very old precedents.
ReplyDeleteTake, for instance, the decision in Kelo, which is mentioned in the article you linked. People are up in arms over this thing. You'd think that no government on American soil had ever gone so far as the New London Redevelopment Agency went, had never told private property owners that their land was going to be taken and put to a different, more economical (in the eyes of the local leadership) use. But unfortunately for the anti-Kelo crowd, that court was following hundred-year-old precedents and there's plenty of historical evidence that local governments, even back to our storied colonial days (when everybody was a Christian and we all had a happy little libertarian paradise), routinely took property for economic development, or required landowners to develop their property to a specified level.
But, you know, we're Americans, so we make short work of all that by just forgetting history and then demanding that judges — who are highly educated readers of both judicial precedents and history — are just a bunch of partisan wankers.
In the way it's been latched onto by political opportunists who are completely ignorant of its legal underpinnings and precedents, Kelo is the new Roe.
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