COMMENTARY: The Supreme Court is the only one of the three branches of US government that is functioning properly.<\/p>\n
Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the Supreme Court, is the shortest of the three articles that define the institutions and powers of the three branches of the United States Government. That brevity underscores, somewhat ironically, what many would regard as a self-evident contemporary fact: The Supreme Court today is the only one of those three branches that is functioning properly. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Which is certainly something to ponder in the weeks before the nation marks its 250th birthday on July 4. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Congress has become so dysfunctional that, a year ago, I gently asked a dozen Members of the House of Representatives whether Article I of the Constitution, which vests national legislative powers in the Congress, had been effectively repealed in the minds of many of their colleagues. According to the Pew Research Center<\/a>, Congress, whose primary power is the power of the purse, has only completed its budget work on schedule four times in the past 50 years; on all other occasions, the cheap trick of passing \u201ccontinuing resolutions\u201d has covered for the solons\u2019 incapacity or unwillingness to do their jobs. As for the Senate, it routinely and supinely confirms manifestly incompetent men and women to high office, a practice that effectively eviscerates its constitutional role of giving advice and consent to candidates for crucial executive branch positions. \u00a0<\/p>\n As for the presidency, well, as my friend Peggy Noonan put it in her Wall Street Journal column<\/a> of April 4, we are now governed by the \u201cmood of one man. With the great majority of past presidents personal mood didn\u2019t have much precedence. \u2026 But mood now mows down all.\u201d And fear of presidential mood swings reduces even serious public officials to \u201canxious ferrets sparring with Sunday news show anchors.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n The Supreme Court, on the other hand, regularly does its constitutional duty and is governed by reason and serious debate, not by partisan political calculations or the justices\u2019 mood of the day.\u00a0<\/p>\n It is my privilege to know several members of the current Supreme Court. And on the basis of four decades of Washington experience I can say, without any fear of exaggeration, that these are among the finest public servants I have ever met. They do their jobs without fear or favor. They and their families suffer from the inconveniences (and worse) of having to endure constant security protection from a lunatic fringe: one that finds encouragement from the likes of Chuck Schumer, who infamously warned Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh that \u201cyou won\u2019t know what hit you\u201d if future abortion cases got decided in a way that displeased the Senate minority leader. \u00a0<\/p>\n Then there was that malodorous \u201cTruth Social\u201d post of last March, in which Mr. Trump declared that \u201cOur Country was unnecessarily RANSACKED by the United States Supreme Court, which has become little more than a weaponized and unjust Political Organization.\u201d Why this splenetic presidential eruption? Because the justices remembered that their sworn allegiance was to the Constitution, not to Donald J. Trump, who petulantly labeled them \u201ccompletely inept and embarrassing.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n The Democratic Party is now embracing numerous proposals for Supreme Court \u201creform\u201d \u2014 adding four justices to the current nine; denying the Court the right to determine which cases it will decide; term-limiting the justices \u2014 that would thoroughly politicize the Court and effectively destroy it as an independent institution of the federal government. Why is this happening? Various pseudo-rationales are offered. But the bottom of the bottom line, previewed in Senator Schumer\u2019s rhetorical bullying of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, is that this Supreme Court had the audacity to reverse Roe v. Wade, the 1973 SCOTUS decision that invented a right to abortion out of thin air \u2014 a decision deplored by ultraliberal legal scholar and future Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox<\/a> as lacking a \u201cprincipled\u201d legal foundation. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Some years ago, I was speaking with a bishop about his first experience of the bishops\u2019 conference, which by ill luck happened to be the June 2002 Dallas meeting to address the sexual abuse crisis. An elderly bishop came up to the newbie, welcomed him to the conference, and then said, wistfully, \u201cThis used to be fun.\u201d One can imagine a parallel situation in which the ghosts of such 19th-century giants as John Marshall and Joseph Story lament to Justices Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Clarence Thomas \u2014 the usual targets of Democratic, media, and lunatic opprobrium \u2014 \u201cThis used to be fun.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n Serious citizens, though, will give thanks on this semiquincentennial that our country can still produce constitutionally grounded jurists who regard their job as a patriotic duty and courageously honor their oath of office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"COMMENTARY: The Supreme Court is the only one of the three branches of US government that is functioning…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":723077,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,15304,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-723076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-supreme-court","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=723076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/723076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/723077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=723076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=723076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=723076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}