printWhy stage a judicial intervention when you can sit back and let the executive and the legislature accrue more power, a power that invariably will redound to the Courts as well?
On Monday, the High Court, which should check the other two branches of government—how is that working out?—decided against taking up “the constitutionality of the National Security Agency’s surveillance program that collects bulk telephone data of millions of Americans.” (NJ)
When the Supreme Court has the chance to strike down rights-violating laws and legislation (like the Obamacare individual mandate)—it so often declines.
“Monday’s decision,” concludes the National Journal (too charitably, in my opinion), “reaffirms expectations that the justices would rather allow the issue to percolate within the circuit courts first.”
(At least NJ covers such stuff.)
In the case of Obama’s Affordable Care Act, John G. Roberts Jr., chief of the country’s legal politburo of proctologists, rewrote Obamacare, and then proceeded to provide the fifth vote to uphold the individual mandate undergirding the law, thereby undeniably and obscenely extending Congress’s taxing power.
Face it, the idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government is worse than naive. Rather, it WAS recklessly naive of the American Founding Fathers to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve as a check on one another.