this passes; i move

[rm]

http://thomas.loc.gov/home/gpoxmlc108/h3920_ih.xml

Comments

[jamie]

What?!

Balance of the three branches is apparently no longer necessary.

[britgeekgrrl.livejournal.com]

ERK!

Surely the chances of that being passed are nigh infinistesimal, right? I mean, I'm a latecomer to these shores and all, but wouldn't such a law totally and utterly a**fuck the fundamental structure of the US government?

[tommx.livejournal.com]

in other words, a constitutional amendment to make it possible for congress to invalidate the constitution?

uh...

[yoak.livejournal.com]

While I share your horror, it might be a tad premature. It seems certain that such an act will be deemed unconstitutional by the Court. What then?

Are we sure this is real? This seems sufficiently outrageous that I would suspect it just can't be. The dot-gov address carries some weight, I suppose.

[tinywarrior.livejournal.com]

Whoa! I'm truly stunned...and that's saying a lot since I have such an incredibly low opinion of Congress to start with. But this!?! Jesus H. Christ!

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's real (unless someone hacked Thomas). I've used Thomas costantly when I worked for the AP.

[drfardook.livejournal.com]

No kidding.

It took a few minutes to sink in.

These guys do know how the government works right? Right?

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

The Court declares it unconstitutional, and then Congress declares the court decision null and void, and then the universe explodes from teh stupidity. ;)

[schpahky.livejournal.com]

The baldness of everything happening in the government right now terrifies me. How did you find this? I don't see it in the major media venues. Not that I expect this stuff to get any media coverage in a place that's not preaching to the converted.

[vampwillow]

Posted a comment in britgeekgrrl's LJ about how it could be related to 'DoM' issues; looked at your bio page and noticed that someone should say Happy Birthday to your LJ tomorrow!

[yoak.livejournal.com]

Governments do explode from such stupidity. The manner would be a law played out just as you've indicated above, and then some high-profile situation arises on a law that has been struct down / re-passed / etc. Some powerful group, like a state, pushes one side against Congress with the Court's backing...

Governmance by law rather than arbitrary rule of people has always been a little illusory in my opinion, but the pretense has a lot of utility. I'd hate to see it break down on something like this.

Maybe Lewis is a crack-pot and this has no chance of passing and is just being done as part of a Republican show-boating effort during an election year about the evils of "judicial activism," but this guy has not been asked to resign. The drafting and sponsoring of this Act is not being taken as sufficient evidense of incompotence at the job of Congressman. What can be proposed semi-seriously for marketing purposes today can be law soon.

At least the executive power-grab in the Patriot Act had an expiration, and was putatively in response to an emergency. This is the most outrageous power-grab since the Civil War. And it has been six days since proposal... and no outcry.

This scares me.

[yoak.livejournal.com]

I've used Thomas before as well, and I *still* had a hard time believing. It is just so outrageous that I suspected hacking or mistake, or my calendar being off two weeks... anything but this.

Are you serious about moving? Over the last couple of years, I've started to do preliminary research about where to go should it become necessary. I had started to fear that it might... in a decade or two.

You have to be ready because once things start to go Really Bad, it happens fast... and it can become inconvienent to try to leave them.

After doing some research I decided on...

[lilchiva.livejournal.com]

Thailand
really its a good start.
I would recommend it to you only if this is real. I'm going there anyway. Otherwise learn the language of the place you might want to try and start a business there.
This will probably get killed so don't panic.
Love to all

[graene.livejournal.com]

I'm in shock. It was still half-funny this weekend, walking the momument circuit in DC, cracking jokes about all the new fences and barricades, how the bush administration didn't want us to have access to the monuments celebrating our freedom and wondering if Bush and Ashcroft had ever been to these sites, read the quotes on their walls.

Shit. We seriously need to start teaching civics in our schools again. With teachers who believe in a democratic republic of the common citizens.

bad, very, very bad.

It's real

[lilchiva.livejournal.com]

just say Google (Congressional Accountability for Judicial Activism Act of 2004)

Re: It's real

[lilchiva.livejournal.com]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Congressional+Accountability+for+Judicial+Activism+Act+of+2004&btnG=Google+Search

of historical interest

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

There was an interesting article in the LA Times (a better newspaper than I previously credited) about something similar in 1861 - an attempt to pass an unamendable constitutional amendment that would legalize slavery. The more things change...

"
SAN FRANCISCO — With the country anxious about war and the economy, a Republican president, elected with less than half the popular vote, publicly expresses support for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that aims to entrench a conservative social policy preference that seems to have national support.

No, I'm not talking about President Bush's public endorsement of a constitutional amendment on same-sex marriage. Rather, I'm speaking of Abraham Lincoln's mild embrace of the Corwin amendment, a proposal to guarantee that slavery would be immune from congressional abolition — even if a later constitutional amendment attempted to reverse it.
"

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-amar14mar14,1,1920382.story
(registration required)

[lawnrrd]

The bill, as such, is meaningless, even if enacted into law.

The Constitution of the United States creates the U.S. Supreme Court and gives that Court appellate jurisdiction over cases involving federal law. The Constitution is "the supreme law of the land," which means that nothing short of Constitutional amendment can abolish the Court or take away its jurisdiction. So Congress can't keep the cases out of the Supreme Court in the first place.

Once the case reaches the Court, the Court must decide the case based on the law before it. Again, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Any Act of Congress that contravenes the Constitution is therefore invalid, as is any such state law. The bill you mention can't change that: a two-thirds vote of Congress is legally meaningless under the Constitution, an unconstitutional law is still unconstitutional, and I'm sure that this new bill would be struck down immediately on any challenge. So much for the legal question.

The political question is more complicated and more troubling. The executive branch has "the power of the sword"—the various law enforcement agencies and the military. Congress has "the power of the purse"—it controls how federal money is allocated. For its part, the Supreme Court has about a hundred guys in its security office, and these guys don't go out to enforce the Court's judgments.

The Supreme Court's only real power lies in others' respect for its moral authority and for the rule of law. It falls to the executive to carry out the Court's judgments. If the executive willfully refuses to do that in some case, we have to hope that Congress will at least have enough respect for the principle of legality to cut off the money, or even to impeach the President. If Congress refuses to do so, the people may be able to vote all the bastards out of office. If they can't even do that, well, it's meaningless to talk about law or constitutional government, and we're left with dictatorship and maybe civil war.

(As an aside, passage of this bill would be deeply troubling, as a sign of Congressional abandonment of the rule of law.)

When the executive, Congress, and strong popular opinion converge against the Supreme Court, it's possible that the Court's decision will simply be ignore. Andrew Jackson did it when the Court held that the resettlement of the Cherokees (I think) was illegal; Jackson told the court more or less explicitly to fuck off, and Congress and the people decided that the rule of law could be dispensed with since they weren't themselves Cherokees. Brown v. Board of Education didn't really do much to desegregate the nation's schools: it took an Act of Congress to do that.

Our government, like any other, is not a thing apart from the people. The American people are the government, and that government will exist so long as enough people are willing to comprise it. They'll do that so long as they think they're basically doing the right thing, even if sometimes they have to tell themselves that "maybe it's not the best thing, but everyone's doing it." We're fortunate to have a nation where people believe as strongly as they do in the rule of law. But if enough people believe that the law is wrong or destructive, the government as a whole will ignore it, despite anything the Supreme Court does.

[saltbox.livejournal.com]

Not-So Supreme: The dumb new proposal to veto the Supreme Court.