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Cruz: Opposition To Same-Sex Marriage Will Be 'Front And Center' In 2016 Campaign

disneydude said:
Nothing I am implying even comes close to a "Slippery Slope"....do you know what a Slippery Slope is? What you are advocating is doing away with the core structure of the Constitution and the principles that it stands for. What you are really advocating is to eliminate the Constitution.....at least be honest about it.
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Supreme Court judges eliminate the constitution every time they legislate from the bench...they were never intended to have such power.

By using constitutional processes to hold them accountable to the American People, we can reestablish the intent of the constitution - to have three separate but equal branches of government.

American government, I strongly feel, ought to be of the people, by the people, and for THE PEOPLE.

That's not 9 unelected autocrats serving for life. Let them be accountable to the people of the United States. Let the people decide.
 
Peter Grimm said:
We have a great constitution, the greatest constitution on earth.

One of the great things about it is the amendment process which makes it a living document. So, just like we amended the constitution to allow people to vote for their senators, if we were to do the same amendment process to allow the people to vote for their Supreme Court justices, I would applaud that as a victory for democracy, the constitution, and Americans.

I don't believe anybody is so high and mighty that they should be above the "inconvenience" of having to be elected. Supreme Court judges are human like the rest of us.

We elect our president, we elect our representatives, our senators, our governors, our mayors, etc. why should our judges not be held to the same standard?
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I don't think I would go as far as to have Supreme Court justices elected, for the same reasons the Framers chose not to do that. A balance has to be struck between insulating the Supreme Court from temporary political shifts and letting it be a law unto itself, as it just was in Obergefell. I think the balance the Constitution strikes is not too far off. Justices may be impeached and tried, and in the early days of this country one of them was. The Court depends entirely on the Executive Branch to enforce its decisions, and even then, no president could hope to enforce a decision if many states refused to comply with it. A president may also decline to enforce a Supreme Court decision he believes to be unconstitutional, as Lincoln did with Dred Scott v. Sandford. Or, a president may dilute the power of current justices by appointing more, as Roosevelt proposed to do by having twelve instead of nine.

Congress can check the Judicial Branch, too. It can make laws to alter the Court's decisions--the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which weakened the effect of Employment Division v. Smith, is just one example. Congress can even make a law that completely removes the Court's jurisdiction over a case, as it did in Ex Parte McCardle, 74 U.S. 506 (1869). If interpreted broadly, McCardle suggests that Congress could in effect overrule Marbury v. Madison by not providing for the Supreme Court's appellate or certiorari jurisdiction. It is pretty clear Congress could remove the jurisdiction of lower federal courts, considering they only exist at all because it created them by law.

Sen. Cruz may be right that we need a constitutional amendment to allow Supreme Court justices to be evaluated and removed. I haven't read the details of what he is suggesting. I think a supermajority vote should apply in any action that drastic.
 
CriticalThought said:
Cruz: Opposition To Same-Sex Marriage Will Be 'Front And Center' In 2016 Campaign : It's All Politics : NPR

Well so much for the SCOTUS ruling not being an election issue. I wonder how much traction the judicial elections amendment will get. I am sure the liberals would love another shot at Citizens United and Hobby Lobby in their lifetime.
It might not go like Cruz thinks.
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There is a reason the founding fathers wanted to put justices above the sway of election cycles and political parties.
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Ted Cruz is living in a dream world. He will never change what the U.S. Supreme Court has done.
 
Peter Grimm said:
Supreme Court judges eliminate the constitution every time they legislate from the bench...they were never intended to have such power.

By using constitutional processes to hold them accountable to the American People, we can reestablish the intent of the constitution - to have three separate but equal branches of government.

American government, I strongly feel, ought to be of the people, by the people, and for THE PEOPLE.

That's not 9 unelected autocrats serving for life. Let them be accountable to the people of the United States. Let the people decide.
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You are still shuffling around the question: What would be the point of having a Constitution if the Justices are subject to the whim of the majority? Why would we need one?
 
matchlight said:
Sen. Cruz may be right that we need a constitutional amendment to allow Supreme Court justices to be evaluated and removed. I haven't read the details of what he is suggesting. I think a supermajority vote should apply in any action that drastic.
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There already is a process in place.
 
Hatuey said:
Whatever 2-3 people you're talking about does not really speak for a general depiction of the right wing's reaction. :lol:
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Me and my husband and my sister and her husband and my niece and nephew and my 2 brothers in law. That's 8!
 
tres borrachos said:
Me and my husband and my sister and her husband and my niece and nephew and my 2 brothers in law. That's 8!
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Add my family to that. They are all for folks going their own way. But even the ones who campaigned in their states for homosexual marriage, hate this decision and the way in which they got what they wanted. When will the namecallers learn that the method counts often more than the result.
 
Cruz: Opposition To Same-Sex Marriage Will Be 'Front And Center' In 2016 Camp...

Peter Grimm said:
This is a phenomenal idea. No reason 9 unelected boobs should get to lord over 350 million of us.
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Oh democrats. People like you always seem to think the masses should be trusted with power because they are "wise". How quaint.
 
Peter Grimm said:
None of the three branches were meant to be wholly democratic. We have an electoral college for the executive. Originally, senators were appointed and not elected.

Women and minorities were also originally not allowed to vote.

Luckily, we have improved and democratized our system of government over the years. The electoral college is impotent. Senators are now elected.

I favor holding Supreme Court elections just like we elect senators...in rotating 6 year terms.
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Senators were chosen by the legislature of their respective states and that was to also insulate them from the electorate and to allow them to focus on the interests of the state as a whole. That was a good system that should never have been repealed.

The important point here is to insulate the Court from popular opinion, at least to an extent. If you elect judges you throw that out and the court loses it's effectiveness as a brake on the executive and the legislature
 
I always love the criticism of "unelected judges," as if they spontaneously appear from the wild and take over our nation.
 
tres borrachos said:
Me and my husband and my sister and her husband and my niece and nephew and my 2 brothers in law. That's 8!
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Definitely an important group within the GOP voting blocks. Will you release your detailed thoughts on the matter before next week? :lol:
 
Deuce said:
I always love the criticism of "unelected judges," as if they spontaneously appear from the wild and take over our nation.
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They're like Pokemon. Let's face it, Antonin Scalia could fill in for Snorlax or Chris Christie and nobody would notice the difference.
 
Ex Parte McCardle shows Congress telling the Supreme Court just what it will do, and like it. I don't know of a case that shows any more plainly how just weak the Court really is in a showdown, when Congress is determined to have its way.

In February, 1867, Congress passed a law to help Northerners who were still being detained in former Confederate states. This law authorized anyone who had filed a habeas petition to challenge the lawfulness of his detention, and had a court deny it, to appeal the denial to the Circuit Court for that district (the equivalent of today's federal Courts of Appeal). And the law went even further, providing that anyone who lost in the Circuit Court could appeal right to the Supreme Court of the U.S.

McCardle, a Mississippi newspaper editor, was arrested by the Union Army for publishing articles alleged to be "incendiary and libellous." He was held to await trial by a military commission. He then filed a habeas petition, had it denied, and cleverly took advantage of the new federal law to get his appeal before the Supreme Court. After the Court had already heard oral arguments in his case in March, 1868, an abolitionist-dominated Congress, outraged by having this treasonous rebel use its law in a way it had never intended, finally got fed up. It passed a second law that repealed the one from the year before, removing the Supreme Court's appellate jurisdiction over the case it was just about to decide.

And the Court, having had Congress snatch a case right out from under its nose, knuckled under:

What, then, is the effect of the repealing act upon the case before us? We cannot doubt as to this. Without jurisdiction the court cannot proceed at all in any cause. Jurisdiction is power to declare the law, and when it ceases to exist, the only function remaining to the court is that of announcing the fact and dismissing the cause . . . judicial duty is not less fitly performed by declining ungranted jurisdiction than in exercising firmly that which the Constitution and the laws confer.


Anthony Kennedy and his fellow philosopher-kings felt as arrogant as they did in Obergefell in part because they know there is enough political support nationally for same-sex marriage that something like this would never happen, where that subject is concerned. That does not make their dictate any less inexcusable, though. We have a federal government, and not a national one. Issues of state law are not decided by national majorities, but by the vote of a majority in that state.

Even if nine out of ten of Americans say in a poll that they favor a thing, it is completely irrelevant to the authority of a state where a majority opposes that thing to prohibit it by law. A constitutional right to do a thing does not suddenly leap into existence just because everyone who's in with the in crowd that years just knows that thing is cool and righteous. Statist drones who think otherwise should go and live in a dictatorship.

When this starts to interfere with the freedom of religion, as it is bound to, the Court may want to get out the old books and remind themselves of McCardle. Religious freedom is so fundamental that most Americans will raise all Hell when it is trampled on in the name of homosexual rights. That had already begun to happen in cases involving state public accommodations laws, and Obergefell will make it much worse. The proponents of the homosexual agenda have been waging war on organized religions for years, but never quite so directly. They had better be ready for a fight, because the religious people they despise are not going to take this lying down.
 
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matchlight said:
I don't think I would go as far as to have Supreme Court justices elected, for the same reasons the Framers chose not to do that. A balance has to be struck between insulating the Supreme Court from temporary political shifts and letting it be a law unto itself, as it just was in Obergefell. I think the balance the Constitution strikes is not too far off. Justices may be impeached and tried, and in the early days of this country one of them was. The Court depends entirely on the Executive Branch to enforce its decisions, and even then, no president could hope to enforce a decision if many states refused to comply with it. A president may also decline to enforce a Supreme Court decision he believes to be unconstitutional, as Lincoln did with Dred Scott v. Sandford. Or, a president may dilute the power of current justices by appointing more, as Roosevelt proposed to do by having twelve instead of nine.

Congress can check the Judicial Branch, too. It can make laws to alter the Court's decisions--the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which weakened the effect of Employment Division v. Smith, is just one example. Congress can even make a law that completely removes the Court's jurisdiction over a case, as it did in Ex Parte McCardle, 74 U.S. 506 (1869). If interpreted broadly, McCardle suggests that Congress could in effect overrule Marbury v. Madison by not providing for the Supreme Court's appellate or certiorari jurisdiction. It is pretty clear Congress could remove the jurisdiction of lower federal courts, considering they only exist at all because it created them by law.

Sen. Cruz may be right that we need a constitutional amendment to allow Supreme Court justices to be evaluated and removed. I haven't read the details of what he is suggesting. I think a supermajority vote should apply in any action that drastic.
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Why should the Supreme Court be insulated from the will of the very people it is meant to govern? The American People are not idiots or children, we can govern ourselves quote capably.

The safeguards to judicial power you have outlined, while important, represent an emergency brake when what we, the Anerican Public, require, is much more involved oversight.

I think we have a fundamental difference of political philosophy. I understand that the American People will get it wrong from time to time, just as the unelected 9 will get it wrong a lot of the time as well. History has proven both of these statements out.

But when the cards are laid down....I would much rather ride with the Anerican People than with 9 elitist appointees who hide behind their robes and their marble walls.
 
Re: Cruz: Opposition To Same-Sex Marriage Will Be 'Front And Center' In 2016 Camp...

Fiddytree said:
Oh democrats. People like you always seem to think the masses should be trusted with power because they are "wise". How quaint.
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What's quaint about democracy, may I ask? Autocratic systems are much older, and, in some cases more romantic.

But, much as we might wish for our Supreme Court to be a King Arthur and the Knights if the round table parallel, they're really just 9 overpaid lawyers with 100 percent job security for life
 
Peter Grimm said:
Why should the Supreme Court be insulated from the will of the very people it is meant to govern? The American People are not idiots or children, we can govern ourselves quote capably.

The safeguards to judicial power you have outlined, while important, represent an emergency brake when what we, the Anerican Public, require, is much more involved oversight.

I think we have a fundamental difference of political philosophy. I understand that the American People will get it wrong from time to time, just as the unelected 9 will get it wrong a lot of the time as well. History has proven both of these statements out.

But when the cards are laid down....I would much rather ride with the Anerican People than with 9 elitist appointees who hide behind their robes and their marble walls.
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The American people voted against the freedom of others based on nothing other than personal feelings. **** em. The people had it wrong, and the court corrected it.
 
CanadaJohn said:
Cruz is Donald Trump with a law degree. They will both, hopefully, not find their way onto the stage for many or any Republican debates.
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Oh actually I hope they will be in all the debates. They'll be far more entertaining that way.
 
Deuce said:
The American people voted against the freedom of others based on nothing other than personal feelings. **** em. The people had it wrong, and the court corrected it.
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The inconsideration with which some people so easily dismiss democracy borders on negligence. Ironically, the callousness of your response in itself makes the best anti-democracy argument thus far on this thread.

Still, I would rather ride with the will of the people than with the will of 9 unknown, unelected lawyers
 
Re: Cruz: Opposition To Same-Sex Marriage Will Be 'Front And Center' In 2016 Camp...

Peter Grimm said:
What's quaint about democracy, may I ask? Autocratic systems are much older, and, in some cases more romantic.

But, much as we might wish for our Supreme Court to be a King Arthur and the Knights if the round table parallel, they're really just 9 overpaid lawyers with 100 percent job security for life
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I was being sarcastic.
 
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