High Court, high stakes: Replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Recommendable! It raises serious questions about the separation of powers and how co-equal the three branches of government are!

"... The fact that a single judge is so strategically important to advancing one political agenda or another ... In Federalist No. 78, titled “The Judiciary Department,” Alexander Hamilton famously describes the courts as the “least dangerous branch.” ...
One of the most important and controversial decisions in American constitutional law was the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, in which the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Marshall established the doctrine of judicial review. This decision established a precedent that has shaped the operation of the courts up to the present day. According to Marbury, courts possess the constitutional authority to review the legislative acts of Congress. For the first few years after the case, the doctrine gathered dust. But by 2008, Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in Boumediene v. Bush equated an absence of judicial review with an absence of legal constraint. The Supreme Court had become the most dominant, towering branch of government, asserting control over the acts of the legislative and executive branches. ...
For all of its moral faults, Dred Scott v. Sanford has more than a few jurisprudential ones, too. Chief Justice Roger Taney attempted to place slavery beyond political debate by making legally unfounded assertions rather than legal arguments – ultimately plunging the nation into Civil War. ... the legacy of the type of legal reasoning and jurisprudential concepts employed by the Court in Dred Scott in order to reach a certain political outcome have lived on. ...
After World War II, the Supreme Court entered into a frenetic period of reshaping American society through cases centering on individual rights. ... It is that the courts side-stepped constitutional restraints on the power of the judiciary in order to do so. Constitutionally, a federal court can only consider a “case or controversy” rather than a theoretical legal question. This requires an actual litigant whose relevant rights are at issue and grants them “standing.” The Warren and Burger Courts proved to be particularly adept at discovering standing in unexplored and dusty jurisprudential corners. Further, the Supreme Court has no constitutional power to legislate, but many of the era’s decisions contain complex enforcement schemes and judicially created remedies which bear striking resemblance to legislation in form, substance, and application. ..."

High Court, high stakes: Replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg – Acton Institute PowerBlog