“The Supreme Court is completely out of control, making laws on their own, and has become a public opinion poll instead of a judicial body. If we want to save some money, let’s just get rid of the court,” GOP presidential candidate Bobby Jindal tweeted, obviously disappointed by today’s gay-marriage decision.
It’s hard to tell whether he’s serious, or just having a big cow. He’s certainly not the first politician to feel frustrated by a Supreme Court decision; FDR tried to “pack” the court with more justices after it repeatedly blocked his New Deal programs, and Eisenhower famously said he made two mistakes while president, “and both of them are sitting on the Supreme Court.”
Jindal, who was a Rhodes Scholar, is no intellectual slouch. (Unlike some of the GOP candidates.) He certainly knows our system of government is based on three separate but co-equal branches of government that act as checks and balances on each other.
For example, when Virginia enacted a racist law making it a crime for blacks and whites to marry, the Supreme Court stepped in to protect individual rights against state action by striking it down as unconstitutional in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). No doubt Virginia politicians, and a good many voters as well, didn’t like it; but ever since Chief Justice John Marshall’s Marbury v. Madison decision in 1803, the Supreme Court has been the de facto arbiter of which laws are valid and which aren’t. The highest courts of all 50 states have similar powers of judicial review under their respective state constitutions.
Is Jindal now proposing to do away with that system? Does he believe our personal liberties would be safer, or as safe, as they are today under a two-branch government consisting only of Congress and the Executive Branch? Nah, I don’t think he really believes that. I think he’s just blowing off steam. And playing to the religious conservatives he hopes to woo in the upcoming GOP primaries.
Which makes him a demagogue.
Photo: A smart guy, but not grown up enough to be president.