Fighting Fire with Fire
So I guess the Democratic response to the Bush administration's 8-years of disrespect for the separation of powers is to one-up him?
On the op-ed page of the New York Times,
Jean Edward Smith argues that if the Roberts Court keeps on its current
path, a future Democratic President and Democratic Congress should
consider a court-packing plan and add Justices to ensure a liberal
majority on the Supreme Court. This might be necessary, Smith contends,
because the Roberts Court has "adopt[ed] a manifestly ideological
agenda," "plung[ing] the court into the vortex of American politics"
where it now decides political questions rather than the purely legal
decisions of the Warren Court.
And by the way, I would have said that the Roberts court has followed a distinctly non-ideological agenda. In fact, I can't figure out how they are making decisions from one case to the next. This court bears the hallmarks of one that is really evenly divided, with backroom negotiating going on to get a majority that reeks of compromise rather than anything either ideological or Constitutional. Every major decision seems to have five or six written opinions.
