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Thomas Jefferson wasn't even present for the Constitutional Convention. If you really wanted to summon a ghost, you would summon James Madison. With regard to

Thomas Jefferson wasn't even present for the Constitutional Convention. If you really wanted to summon a ghost, you would summon James Madison. With regard to the feeling underlying the snark, the reason judges have power to overturn laws enacted by the people is that the people agreed to be bound by the Constitution as the supreme law of the land when they ratified it. We thus have to take into consideration what they believed they were agreeing to. If a judge could just decide whether a law was good or not solely based on their beliefs and judgments, you are basically having a philosopher king who rules solely based on his wisdom.

krapp 3y ago
>If a judge could just decide whether a law was good or not solely based on their beliefs and judgments, you are basically having a philosopher king who rules solely based on his wisdom. Unless you're arguing the Supreme Court is made up of necromancers, that's exactly what they do. If they had some objective understanding of what consensus the founding fathers or the people would have reached about any issues of the time, much less the thorny and complex issues of today, there would never be a split decision, nor disagreements between them based on their individual interpretations, nor reversals. Not that their beliefs and judgements exist entirely in a vacuum, but the results are called opinions for a reason. Educated opinions are still just that. And I'm not even going to mention that the Supreme Court's power of judicial review, itself, isn't even Constitutional, thus not a power the people who drafted or ratified the Constitution agreed that it should have, at least not the point of actually putting it in writing in the only document where it mattered. They just decided they had that power, solely based on their wisdom.
bandyaboot 3y ago
> If a judge could just decide whether a law was good or not solely based on their beliefs and judgments, you are basically having a philosopher king who rules solely based on his wisdom. I mean, it doesn’t sound great, but I’ll take the “wisdom” of a group of people who are aware of a couple centuries worth of context over the “wisdom” of a group of people without that awareness.

krapp 3y ago

>If a judge could just decide whether a law was good or not solely based on their beliefs and judgments, you are basically having a philosopher king who rules solely based on his wisdom. Unless you're arguing the Supreme Court is made up of necromancers, that's exactly what they do. If they had some objective understanding of what consensus the founding fathers or the people would have reached about any issues of the time, much less the thorny and complex issues of today, there would never be a split decision, nor disagreements between them based on their individual interpretations, nor reversals. Not that their beliefs and judgements exist entirely in a vacuum, but the results are called opinions for a reason. Educated opinions are still just that. And I'm not even going to mention that the Supreme Court's power of judicial review, itself, isn't even Constitutional, thus not a power the people who drafted or ratified the Constitution agreed that it should have, at least not the point of actually putting it in writing in the only document where it mattered. They just decided they had that power, solely based on their wisdom.

bandyaboot 3y ago

> If a judge could just decide whether a law was good or not solely based on their beliefs and judgments, you are basically having a philosopher king who rules solely based on his wisdom. I mean, it doesn’t sound great, but I’ll take the “wisdom” of a group of people who are aware of a couple centuries worth of context over the “wisdom” of a group of people without that awareness.