Originally Posted by dksuddeth

remember this phrase.....'power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely'.

Now, Are the USSC justices smart people? I would assume so since almost every USSC justice has been to law school and been a lawyer. One shouldn't assume that they understand their role in govt. Some probably have, while some have probably salivated at the opportunity to make long standing federal policy. Their role should be to interpret the laws as written, compared to the plain text of the constitution, then decide if those written laws violate the plain text of the constitution. When you allow those justices to also interpret the constitution, you end up with tortured variations of the constitution so that you end up with rulings that you end up with 'public use' being defined as 'increasing the tax base of a community', such as we ended up with the Kelo decision. Had those justices NOT 'interpreted' the constitution, but ruled along the plain text, there is no possible way that 'public use' could be interpreted to mean 'stealing private property, handing it over to another private entity for development, and then calling it public use because it increases tax revenue'.

Where 'we the people' messed up was allowing that bullshit to go unpunished. When a decision is handed down, and we the people know damned well that it violates the constitution, we should have pushed for an impeachment of those justices. Why did we not? I would assume that most of us are at least intelligent enough to read the constitution and understand it, right?

for example, we passed the 14th Amendment to insure that all recently freed slaves enjoyed all the rights of US citizenship, correct? yet when us v cruikshank was ruled upon in direct contravention of the 14th Amendment, because those judges were racist, we didn't act and we should have.

Of course, i'm sure that some people will say that impeaching justices for bad rulings sets bad precedent or some such thing. But isn't changing or ignoring the will of the people in effect treason?

power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

we should not let those we put in to positions of power and authority abuse that trust.