The idea of restraint is un-American. Our culture is a culture of excesses; we live in the richest country, with the best military, the biggest houses, and the fattest people. We live and thrive on how much better we are than others and how much excess freedom we have to live our lives the way we want to. Perhaps the greatest excess ever granted to anyone in this country is the power of judicial review given to the Supreme Court in Marbury vs. Madison. The Supreme Court has given itself a great power; to determine, interpret, and strike down laws based entirely upon how the nine justices happen to be feeling that day. This great power is one that can, should, and has to be wielded. The Supreme Court has to use all of the power at its disposal
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While Alexander Bickel may disagree with how the Supreme Court came to their decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, he would ultimately agree that they made the moral choice. That the Supreme Court runs afoul of Bickel’s counter-majoritarian difficulty from time to time is not a great weakness of our political system but perhaps its most important and greatest strength. Democracy has wronged those who are different because their skin was a different color, because their religious beliefs were not the same, and because they acted unlike everyone else. All of these groups were wronged by a vengeful majority intent on seeing these people not succeed. As John Hart Ely writes in Democracy and Distrust, “Malfunction occurs when the process is undeserving of trust…(Ely 103)” White Arkansans, backed by the governor of Arkansas, would have stopped the Little Rock nine from entering Central High School had the National Guard not been called. The people who make up our democracy are not infallible. They are prone to their own biases which prevent them from being the selfless actors that an infallible system requires. As Ely writes, “Appointed judges, however, are comparative outsiders in our governmental system and need worry about continuance in office only very obliquely. This does not give them some special pipeline to the genuine values of the American …show more content…
Thus, they have a moral imperative to interpret the law without restraint. Without restraint, an impartial body such as the Supreme Court can rule in the most righteous, complete, modern, fair, and most American
While Alexander Bickel may disagree with how the Supreme Court came to their decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, he would ultimately agree that they made the moral choice. That the Supreme Court runs afoul of Bickel’s counter-majoritarian difficulty from time to time is not a great weakness of our political system but perhaps its most important and greatest strength. Democracy has wronged those who are different because their skin was a different color, because their religious beliefs were not the same, and because they acted unlike everyone else. All of these groups were wronged by a vengeful majority intent on seeing these people not succeed. As John Hart Ely writes in Democracy and Distrust, “Malfunction occurs when the process is undeserving of trust…(Ely 103)” White Arkansans, backed by the governor of Arkansas, would have stopped the Little Rock nine from entering Central High School had the National Guard not been called. The people who make up our democracy are not infallible. They are prone to their own biases which prevent them from being the selfless actors that an infallible system requires. As Ely writes, “Appointed judges, however, are comparative outsiders in our governmental system and need worry about continuance in office only very obliquely. This does not give them some special pipeline to the genuine values of the American …show more content…
Thus, they have a moral imperative to interpret the law without restraint. Without restraint, an impartial body such as the Supreme Court can rule in the most righteous, complete, modern, fair, and most American