The following was written by Heather Cox Richardson in her Newsletter of March 4th 2024 which hi lights a major issue in our Federal Constitution. We need to find a way to fix the Constitution without breaking Democracy. Will it happen in my life time? Pessimistically, no. In the meantime, voting is so important — we must find and elect unbiased leaders.
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There is, perhaps, a larger story behind the (Supreme Courts) majority’s musings on future congressional actions. Its decision to go beyond what was required to decide a specific question and suggest the boundaries of future legislation pushed it from judicial review into the realm of lawmaking.
For years now, Republicans, especially Republican senators who have turned the previously rarely-used filibuster into a common tool, have stopped Congress from making laws and have instead thrown decision-making to the courts.
Two days ago, in Slate, legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern noted that when Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was Senate majority leader, he “realized you don’t need to win elections to enact Republican policy. You don’t need to change hearts and minds. You don’t need to push ballot initiatives or win over the views of the people. All you have to do is stack the courts. You only need 51 votes in the Senate to stack the courts with far-right partisan activists…[a]nd they will enact Republican policies under the guise of judicial review, policies that could never pass through the democratic process. And those policies will be bulletproof, because they will be called ‘law.’”
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Jims BBS 