Ever hear of court stripping? I hadn’t until today, although I think, looking back, I’d heard small hints about it. Thom Hartmann suggests the Democrats may need to use it to defy SCOTUS – legally:
Democrats in Congress need to reverse that bizarre and nation-destroying decision with a new law declaring the end to this American political crime spree, and re-criminalize bribery of elected officials.
And they need to do it in a way that defies the Court’s declaration that money is “free speech” and corporations are “persons.”
That defiance requires something called “court stripping.“
Republicans understand exactly what I’m talking about: they tried to do the same thing most recently in 2005 with the Marriage Protection Act, which passed the House of Representatives on July 22, 2004.
That law, designed to override Supreme Court protections of LGBTQ people, contained the following court stripping paragraph:
“No court created by Act of Congress shall have any jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court shall have no appellate jurisdiction, to hear or decide any question pertaining to the interpretation of, or the validity under the Constitution of, section 1738C or this section.”
In other words, Congress wrote that this law is consistent with the constitution, and that they are deciding that…and the Supreme Court, with regard to the Marriage Protection Act, has no say in the matter.
This assertion that each of the three branches should have its own opinions about a law’s constitutionality, is consistent with a view of the Supreme Court expressed at various times by both Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, among numerous others of the Founders.
There is literally nothing in the Constitution that gives the Supreme Court the exclusive right to decide what the Constitution says: that is a power the Supreme Court took onto itself in 1803 in a decision, Marbury v Madison, that drove then-President Jefferson nuts. [The Hartmann Report]
It’s a weird and interesting thought that I somehow haven’t stumbled across. I think the American public is mostly accustomed to the idea that SCOTUS has the right to decide on the Constitutionality of any law; the idea that this can be shielded via simple provision seems outrageous.
But it may be true.
Which leaves the voters, more than ever, the final arbiters of a law. I’m not sure what to think of that. Give the article a read. Hartmann appears to have bulging eyes syndrome, but that doesn’t make him wrong.
