Supreme Court--l'etat c'est moi!

A few days ago Obama gave his first State of the Union address. I’ve spent the days since trying to figure out if there was anything worth responding to. I suppose you could have listened to that speech and said, “Well, he’s finally started to fight”.
Yea-ah, but when you compare his rhetoric to the parliamentary ripostes of a master orator like Churchill, or the emotion chocked response of the Army’s chief counsel, Joseph Welch, to the hectoring style of Joe McCarthy, Barack Obama still hits “like a girl”.
But he did do one thing that commentators tell us has only been done a very few times in the history of the Republic—he publicly, face to face, faulted the Supreme Court on a ruling (the one that allows corporations to give as much money to politicians as they wish). I’ll say Good On You for that!
The shocked justices sat stonily silent, except for Alito who actually shook his head back at the President. After all, the Supreme Court is sacrosanct, isn’t it? When it speaks, that’s the last word, isn’t it? Who would dare raise an issue after the Court has settled it?
Who is this Obama fellow, a mere President, to publicly suggest the Supreme Court made a bad call? It just isn’t done—not by Congress, not by ordinary people, not by presidents. And exactly why not?
However glancingly, even timorously, Obama made his point it’s one that’s worth looking at and thinking about. The court has been allowed to assume unto itself over the past two centuries a position not unlike that taken by Louis XIV when he declared that he, and he alone, constituted all the governmental powers of the state—“l’ etat c’est moi!”
It certainly didn’t start out this way. The job of supreme court justice had such low prestige when the country started it was hard to find men to take it. Those that did tended to resign rather quickly and go do something useful.
It doubt very much whether the Constitutional Convention ever intended this to happen. They were so concerned with too much power gravitating to the Executive (the King), that they really never gave much thought to reigning in the judiciary.
The President can veto a Congressional Bill. Congress can override the President’s veto. But where is there a right for anyone in any branch of our government to veto or override the Court? (Yes, we can pass a Constitutional Amendment, but that takes years and would often be impractical, cluttering up the Constitution with single case amendments. Congress can impeach—but what a mess that is—what if all Congress could do to stop a President was to impeach him?)
The Court stands alone with an unchallengeable power that would not doubt have horrified Franklin, Madison or even Washington. Obama is considered (validly so) daring and bold because he dares hint in public that a Court decision will do damage to the nation.
The mere fact that he’s right is irrelevant. He is guilty of lese-majestie—against a court of nine un-elected men empowered for life. Whoa.
Andy Jackson dared to react to a Court decision he considered wrong by saying, “John Marshall (Chief Justice) has made his law; let him enforce it.” That decision never was carried out.
After all, the right to overturn any law or regulation without question is a power only granted to the court BY THE COURT ITSELF (Marbury v Madison—1804). Maybe it’s time for another branch of the government to step in and say, “You’ve played with that long enough now”.
Jackson felt he could ignore it. (If either Congress or the President had the nerve to set aside a Supreme Court decision today, you’d be amazed at how circumspect the court would become in its future promulgations.) If the Court can proclaim it HAS absolute power—why can’t one of the other branches proclaim it DOES NOT?
Something to think about.