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To: Cincinatus' Wife
Restore the proper role of the judicial branch by using the clearly delineated Constitutional powers available to the president and Congress to correct, limit, or replace judges who violate the Constitution.

An excellent idea.

However, the President has little or no power over a serving judge. Once nominated by the President, he has little further way of influencing him.

Congress, OTOH, is supreme over the judiciary.

Which illustrates the fallacy of the "three co-equal branches of government" notion.

The judicial and executive branches have strictly limited direct powers over Congress, which has absolute and final power over the other two branches, up to and including the governmental equivalent of life and death power, impeachment and removal from office.

Congress has ceased using its constitutional powers, as most of them have become careerists more interested in re-election than in exercising power. It's just easier for Congress to pass the buck to the executive and (especially) judicial branches on tough issues.

But that doesn't change where the Constitution quite intentionally put the power, in Congress.

20 posted on 03/28/2012 4:38:36 AM PDT by Sherman Logan
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To: Sherman Logan
Congress has ceased using its constitutional powers, as most of them have become careerists more interested in re-election than in exercising power. It's just easier for Congress to pass the buck to the executive and (especially) judicial branches on tough issues.

But that doesn't change where the Constitution quite intentionally put the power, in Congress.

That is what congress did with health care, they ceded their legislative power to the executive "rule making authority."

I'll quote from William Blackstone's Commentaries, a book every lawyer had to know by heart to be admitted to the bar before the progressive era.

In all tyrannical governments the supreme magistracy, or the right both of making and of enforcing the laws, is vested in one and the same man, or one and the same body of men; and wherever these two powers are united together, there can be no public liberty. The magistrate many enact tyrannical laws, and execute them in a tyrannical manner, since he is possessed, in quality of dispenser of justice, with all the power which he as legislator thinks proper to give himself. But, where the legislative and executive authority are in distinct hands, the former will take care not to entrust the latter with so large a power, as may tend to the subversion of it's own independence, and therewith of the liberty of the subject.

27 posted on 03/28/2012 6:02:58 AM PDT by ALPAPilot
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