Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id739854543
The US Constitution, flawed though it is, has already answered the question of who gets to decide how to enforce our laws. The Constitution says, quite clearly, that Congress passes laws and the president enforces them. The Supreme Court, constitutionally speaking, has no role in determining whether Congress was right to pass the law, or if the executive branch is right to enforce it, or how presidents should use the authority granted to them by Congress. So, for instance, if Congress passes a Clean Air Act (which it did in in 1963) and the president creates an executive agency to enforce it (which President Richard Nixon did in 1970), then it’s really not up to the Supreme Court to say, “Well, actually, ‘clean air’ doesn’t mean what the EPA thinks it means.”
✏️ Summarizing how the branches should be working, and who gets what abilities, or not. 🔗 View Highlight
id739854597
For an unelected panel of judges to come in, above the agencies, and tell them how the president is allowed to enforce laws, is a perversion of the constitutional order and separation of powers—and a repudiation of democracy itself.
✏️ What is basically happening with this power grab 🔗 View Highlight
id739855409
Supreme Court, as an institution, has fought to exceed the limits of its constitutional power from the very beginning.
id739855480
the appropriate historical context for its ruling today is not 1984 and its Chevron decision, but its 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison. It was then, back when the country was still in its swaddling blankets, that the Supreme Court declared itself the sole interpreter of the Constitution. The word “unconstitutional” appears nowhere in the Constitution, and the power to decide what is or is not constitutional was not given to the court in the Constitution or by any of the amendments. The court decided for itself that it had the power to revoke acts of Congress and declare actions by the president “unconstitutional,” and the elected branches went along with it.
✏️ The history of the court grabbing power stems right from the beginning, more than two hundred years ago. 🔗 View Highlight
id739855613
The court has no enforcement power of its own, so there’s no inherent reason either the president or Congress has to defer to its demands, other than by convention and tradition.
id739855661
The court can now: veto acts of Congress as unconstitutional, decide who gets to be president, and decide what the president is allowed to do while in office.