SCOTUS is too powerful. How can we change that?

A Twitter follower asked me what I would do to rein in the power of the Supreme Court.

That is a very good question in light of the recent news cycle. If you missed it, Donald Trump was able to nominate another Supreme Court justice.

The Left went nuts, the “Right” spiked the football and all is well with the political world if you aren’t a SJW.

Except it isn’t. The real answer should be “Who cares who is on the Supreme Court?”

All of the hand wringing on both sides could be solved by one simple word: federalism.

You see, the founding generation designed the Supreme Court to be the least powerful branch of government. You wouldn’t know that if you have a social media account. Predictions of death, pestilence, famine, and genocide have followed Trump’s nomination of the very vanilla Brett Kavanaugh. To the Left–and many on the so-called “Right,” the Court is the final political arbiter. I remember John McCain thundering “We’re going to take Obamacare to the Supreme Court!”

Yeah!

How did that work out?

Reminds me of Tom Woods’s saying that no matter who the Republicans nominate, you always get John McCain.

The culprit in all this insanity is the Congress. The original Constitution died with the passage of the Judiciary Act in June of 1789.

You see, the friends of the document, John Marshall included, insisted the SCOTUS would never invalidate a State law unless it clearly violated Article I, Section 10, and even then there was some debate about what powers the SCOTUS would have in relation to constitutional interpretation.

Section 25 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 allowed for State court decisions to be appealed to the Supreme Court. That should never have happened. But it did, and now we are suffering the consequences.

Everything is a “national” issue even if it isn’t.

Hence, think locally, act locally. We would all be much happier if we let California be California and South Carolina be South Carolina and stopped worrying about what the stooges from some other State have to say about our laws and culture.

I discuss this in Episode 168 of The Brion McClanahan Show.