My colleague, Ken Boesch, teaches upper school history and leads Westminster's team in the We the People competition each year (they've won Missouri's contest the past nine years straight). One day over lunch, Ken asked me who I thought the ten most influential U.S. government leaders were. I immediately started thinking of offices—the President; the Vice-President; the Speaker of the House; the Senate Majority leader, etc.
Ken answered his own question: Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, and the nine federal Supreme Court justices. When I asked why, Ken explained that when Mr. Bernanke so much as sneezes, the markets go crazy (think of it as an instant economic stimulus package), and when Supreme Court justices are appointed, they are appointed for life and have no real oversight (though the Senate can supposedly remove a member, but it's only happened once in the history of the court).
On the heels of yesterday's post on gay “marriage,” I'm rethinking my initial resistance to the idea that the Presidential election in November may just be the most important of my lifetime (I'm trying to remember an election that wasn't billed as "most important," but I'm not coming up with one). Hype aside, the reality is that the next President could possibly replace as many as three federal Supreme Court justices - each for an average term of 20-30 years, which is a good chunk of living, indeed.
According to Ken, the framers of the Constitution are rolling over in their graves at the concept of judicial review—our modern-day practice of disregarding the original intent of the Constitution's writers and reading into it our own. I drew the analogy that it's the same thing we deal with in biblical studies—a proper hermeneutic (interpretation) has to start with exegeting (reading out) authorial intent and not isogeting (reading into) desired meaning. This is a major problem in both constitutional and scriptural matters.
With regard to the power of the judiciary branch, President Abraham Lincoln (referring in his 1861 First Inaugural Address to the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision) warned:
"If the policy of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court...the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned the government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."
As much as I appreciate our democratic system, the judiciary power of our government seems its most dangerous. We've just seen how a court can push through its bias at a state level in California, and it may not be too long until we see it happen (if we haven't already) at a national level in Washington, D.C. in the next few decades.