DON'T END IT; JUST MAKE IT COMPATIBLE WITH REPUBLICAN LIBERTY:

A presidential commission considering reforms to the court last Wednesday heard from Nikolas Bowie, an associate professor at Harvard Law School. He argued that it is time to end the high court's power of "judicial review," which gives it the authority to declare a law unconstitutional and thus usually gives SCOTUS the last word in battles with the legislative and executive branches.

The Supreme Court's "relationship to Congress is not that of an umpire overseeing a batter, but of a rider overseeing a horse," Bowie told the commission in his written testimony. "Most of the time, the court gives Congress free rein to act as it pleases. But the court remains in the saddle, ready to pull on the reins when Congress moves to disrupt hierarchies of wealth or status." [....]

Judicial review, of course, is mentioned nowhere explicitly in the Constitution -- the court claimed that authority for itself in Marbury v. Madison in 1803. "It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is," Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in the ruling. The precedent has stood for more than 200 years.

Whether that should be the case is now an open question. Noah Feldman, a Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg Opinion columnist, acknowledged in his own testimony that judicial review had made the Supreme Court more powerful than the Founders intended. "It is therefore fair to say that the founding generation did not fully anticipate the modern practice of robust judicial review," he said, "that both empowers the judiciary to protect rights and democratic norms and simultaneously renders the judiciary more capable of harming democracy than it would be without it."

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