Thursday, March 11, 2004

I Guess He Flunked Civics

Every year, hundreds, of not thousands, of meaningless bills are introduced in Congress. They have no hope of passage, but let the sponsors go back to their constituents with a record of at least proposing something to handle some great national crisis. This is one of the more interesting I've seen in a while. It would give Congress the power to overturn decisions of the Supreme Court.

Now, any of you who paid attention in Junior High civics class should know that the Supreme Court basically makes two kinds of rulings: those dealing with statutes and those dealing with the Constitution. For those dealing with statutes, Congress only needs to change the statute at issue, if the Court gets it wrong in its decision. A Constitutional interpretation, on the other hand, can only be changed by amending the Constitution itself. Either way, we have procedures for those things, so why do we need this meaningless piece of legislation clogging the Congressional Record?

Of course, it's called the "Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act of 2004’," so draw your own conclusions.

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