students tout MU's - Monmouth University

“
UNLESSALL
HAVE FREEDOM AND JUSTICE,
IN THE FUTURE ...
NONE WILL HAVE IT,
—NOT EVEN AMERICANS.
can solve every problem, and that states
and democracy can solve no problem. It is
privatization and marketization strategies
that have actually undermined the authority
of democratic governments. The recall
election in California—like the Howard
Dean and Wesley Clark candidacies, and
like President Bush’s own candidacy in
2002—were all about anti-political candidates.
All of them involved candidates
who were running against government as
outsiders. Whether or not then-Governor
Bush or Arnold Schwarzenegger were
really outsiders to the political process is
an obvious question, but the fact that they
identified themselves in that role and sold
themselves as outsiders to politics, as nonpoliticians,
suggests the degree to which
democratic governments and democratic
politicians have fallen into disrepute as a
result of the privatization of politics.
So to come full circle back to the original
question: Though the President in
national security affairs and in war has a
good deal of power, the long-term problem
for America is that the American people
seem to be disempowering themselves as
“
citizens, even as they empower themselves
as consumers. They are taking power from
the political, where they have real representation,
where there’s accountability,
and turning it over to the economic sector,
where they have no real power. And this
means a kind of hemorrhaging of popular
sovereignty in favor of the sovereignty of
private corporations, the sovereignty of
money, the sovereignty of the economic
over the political. That strikes me as the
more serious problem.
�
IN THE FEDERALIST PAPERS, JAMES MADISON STATED THAT
THE LEAST DANGEROUS BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT IS THE
JUDICIARY. HOWEVER, RECENTLY, THE JUDICIARY HAS
BEEN ARGUABLY THE MOST IMPORTANT POLICY SETTER—
IN ROE V. WADE AND BROWN V. BOARD OF EDUCATION, THE
SUPREME COURT HAS BEEN THE FINAL ARBITER.
COMPLICATING THE MATTER IS THAT THE SUPREME COURT
IS THE ONLY BRANCH OF GOVERNMENT NOT ELECTED BY
THE PEOPLE. IS THIS BALANCE OF POWER STILL VIABLE IN
A GROWINGLY HETEROGENEOUS U.S. SOCIETY? DO YOU
FORESEE THAT OUR COUNTRY WILL CONTINUE TO APPOINT
RATHER THAN ELECT SUPREME COURT JUSTICES?
R
eplacing appointed justices with
elected justices just might mean that
Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger
will one day be not only governors of big
states, but also members of the Supreme
Court. So I’m not sure empowering the
people to elect Supreme Court justices
would be an improvement. Moreover, the
Supreme Court is often unpredictable. Its
Nixon appointees and Reagan appointees
have, in some cases, taken liberal positions
with which conservatives today are
unhappy. So courts are less predictable in
terms of expected political partisanship
than we think. Remember, the justices
serve for life. My own view is that their
ideological persuasion on social issues is
not really the problem. The problem is
more the increasing willingness of the
Court to intervene in democratic elections.
In Gore v. Bush, the Supreme Court
gave Bush the Presidency, despite the fact
that there were irregularities in the
Florida voting process and despite the fact
that Bush won only a plurality, not a
majority, of the votes—fewer votes, actually,
than Gore. The issue in my mind is:
Should the Court have even been involved
in deciding this case?
I’m glad the California Supreme Court
refused to delay the recall, even though I
was against it. Interventionist decisions
effectively put the Court in the business of
politics, which is contrary to the single
most significant objective intended by
separating the judiciary from the executive
and legislative ranks: to insulate the
political process from the courts and to
insulate the courts from the political process.
What we are seeing today is that the
courts are much more politicized than
they were intended to be. But even more
important, the legislative and electoral
processes are being “judicialized”—
turned into a set of questions that the
judiciary is supposed to answer. Those
who argue for judicial conservatism ought
to be consistent and admit that judicial
conservatism requires the courts to stay
out of and away from elections—just as far
away as they can. The very opposite has
happened in recent years.
FALL 2003 • Monmouth University Magazine 7