Judicial Ruminations

This will be a short post as this topic can take up books. I wonder how many people have actually read The Federalist Papers? I know it is required reading on some college campuses. With that amount of people having read it, it boggles my mind how uninformed most of the debate on judicial nominations is. People see the Supreme Court as the supreme law of the land, and that is just sad.
Don't get me wrong here. The courts are the third branch of our government and have a very real purpose to perform. That purpose is to take the law as made by the congress and then to apply it to the cases that come before it. If there is no law, then that job is made very simple. "There is no law or precedent to follow. There will be no ruling on this case." Folks, it is that simple. When you have judges peering into the eminations from the pnumbra of the Constitution, then you end up with rulings such as we have seen in the last few decades.
There should be no objection to anyone being a strict constructionist. Those are the people you want on the bench. They are the ones who realize that the Constitution is there to define the limits of government power, with all other powers granted to the people and enacted by the legislature.
The judiciary should be non-political. Their job is to apply the law enacted by the representatives of the people. If they are tied to an ideology, right or left, then there is a temptation to apply their own ideas to their rulings. That is judicial activism. In my next column, I'll look at Roe v Wade. That is a particularly good case in how constructionist thought would have prevented the shrill yelling match that has gone on in this country for years.