Secession?

Puppets???

The way to deal with judges is to have them subjected to electoral discipline. Or to facilitate their replacement by a 3/5 vote of the Senate to throw one out for any reason, not just 'High Crimes and Misdeamenors.'

The application of foreign law as precedent, when that foreign law was written after 7/4/1776, should be cause for automatic impeachment as a violation of one's oath of office.

The only thing that makes the judiciary redeemable is the Founders' removal of electoral influence. All that needs to be done is some limitation on what issues they're permitted to rule on.

None of the states matter. In the next five years, the sweet mystery of life will rise again and the Supreme Court will find DOMA unconstitutional and mandate gay marriage nationwide. If the composition of the Court stays the same or if Rehnquist is the only one to leave, the vote will be 6-3. Jurisdiction-stripping will not stop them.

OJ,

Once again your preference for authoritarian aristocracy shines through. The Supreme Court would simply rule any such limitation unconstitutional and we'd be back to Square One. The people need some kind of check and balance of the court when a liar like Souter, an egomaniac like Blackmun or Powell or scum like Warren, Douglas and Brennan are appointed. Attempts to legislate jurisdiction ain't gonna cut it.

If we can't elect our judges directly, then at least let them be subject to removal for political reasons.

Yes, an effective Republic requires an authoritarian aristocracy--that's how the Founders designed ours.

Nonsense.

The Founders may have restricted the franchise based on property ownership(at a low standard which most people met) but they never envisioned a star chamber deciding what was and was not law. The notion of judicial review was created out of whole cloth by a slimy hack politician named John Marshall who used his Chief Justiceship to preserve his partisan hiring decisions in DC under the Adams administration.

I'd prefer the Committee of Public Safety to the star chamber of intellectual mediocrities and moral zeros that we call a Supreme Court today.

of course they did--that's why they aren't elected and get life tenure.

If they wanted judicial review they would have incorporated judicial review. They were reasonably conversant in the English language.

There was plenty of outrage from signatories of the Constitution about Marshall's partisan actions when he undertook them.

In any event, lifetime tenure is a terrible idea and judges, especially on the Supreme Court, should be subject to electoral discipline. Virtually none of the interventionist nonsense of the last century would have occured whether the COurt that overturned the New Deal or the Warren and Burger courts, were they subject to electoral discipline. Our judiciary behaves as if it is above the law, and no man should be above the law. There are no effective restraints on the actions of our judges. They feel free to betray their oaths of office and utilize foreign decisions as precedent. They slash and burn legislation popular with the citizenry and they impose their own dubious morality on Americans constantly.

If they observed the sort of judicial restraint that characterized the court in the days of Brandeis and Holmes that would be one thing, but they do not. Just as Roger Taney tried to impose slavery on America, today's idiots and criminals in robes try to impose all manner of horribles on our society.

If the people want this stuff, let them elect legislators to do so. Their will should not be frustrated by an unelected thugocracy of dubious intellectual and non-existent moral merit.

Random Lawyer seems to be sure that the plain words of the Constitution concerning legislatively created exceptions to the appellate jurisdiction of the Court are of no effect, presumably having been abrogated by the emantations from the penumbra.

I agree that only that judicial defiance of a legislative restriction on jurisdiction would be a constitutional crisis: that's when we would need our Franco.

Bart:

Exquisite! They were careful drafters but the explicit provisions which make possible what you don't like can't have meant to.

Lou: Law school final exam could be "Come up with six arguments that pass the red-face test why a jurisdiction-stripping law that prevented the Supreme Court from [say] reviewing restrictions on abortion is unconstitutional." Piece of cake.

We're well past the point of constitutional crisis. We're ruled by the likes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who drew fewer than ten dissenting votes in the Senate despite her previous career. A decent society cannot be constructed and cannot endure under such circumstances.

Ginsburg should have been confirmed because she hadn't been convicted of any felonies and she didn't visibly drool.

There is no chance for popular opinion to enter into the choice of judicial critter except through the Presidential election, so the President should get great, almost absolute, deference as to what he appoints. When the bozos he appoints behave true to form, the voters take revenge at the polls.

Of course, it would be a lot simpler if we just changed the Constitution to provide for an elected judiciary.