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By Root 1591 0

elected every four years. Each house has a few special powers. The Senate, for example, must approve treaties by a 2/3 vote, and it sits as the judging body in the case of presidential impeachment. The House is the legislative body that all bills for raising revenue must originate in, and it is the body from which articles for impeachment of the president must be issued. The Constitution also established a judicial body, the Supreme Court, but it did not set forth the powers of the court. Justices appointed to the Supreme Court hold their office for life on good behavior. A simplistic Constitutional overview can be found in the rather ancient but easy to understand book, Your Rugged Constitution by Bruce and Esther Findlay, Stanford University Press, 1969.

The Constitution is a wonderful document; however, it was not and is not perfect. For example, it failed to say what happens if a state wants to leave the union. Can it just up and go without consequences? This omission led to the most terrible war in American history. The Constitution also failed to list the powers of the Supreme Court. As a result, the Supreme Court defined its own powers, and constantly expanded its sway and the dominance of the federal government. In effect, the Supreme Court wrote the Tenth Amendment out of the Constitution. Meanwhile, it wrote in unstated rights by resorting to rather-farfetched arguments about penumbras surrounding the rights given in the Constitution. If the Constitution tried to do anything it was to limit the rights and powers conferred upon the federal government to those written down in the document itself. The Constitution was not supposed to be a flexible “living” document through some weird interpretation of its language. The only flexibility given was the power to amend the Constitution through the stated amendment process. Instead, few amendments are passed; however, the words themselves are given meanings beyond all rational reasoning by the federal courts.

By assigning itself its own powers, the Supreme Court made itself the most dominant institution in the land because it can add to or take away rights and duties listed in the Constitution. No matter how outrageous the decisions nothing can be done about the federal judges. The Constitution places them in office for life on “good behavior.” If a legislator acts irrationally the voters can oust that person from office. Then new lawmakers can change the laws improperly enacted. Not so for the federal judges. No matter how poor their decision there is no recourse for the people to overturn the decision or kick the judge out of office. Can a Constitutional Amendment overturn the decisions? Yes, but that process is all but impossible to complete even against minimal opposition. The powers taken by the federal courts, especially the US Supreme Court, have dramatically altered the balance of power between the government and the people toward the side of the government.

These and other flaws in the Constitution haunt the present day. The framers could not imagine our modern society. We try to bend the words of the Constitution to fit modern times rather than amend the document to deal with contemporary challenges. These results come from revering the document and believing the words came from on high. This delivers unlimited power to the federal courts because the courts step into the power vacuum and tell the millions of people in the United States what the Constitution means, thereby controlling how the United States operates its government. One striking example of this power is the Supreme Court decision changing the way states govern themselves. In the 1964 case of Reynolds v. Sims, the US Supreme Court required every state in the union to abolish its Senate[100], which was elected by area (county) and replace it with a body elected by population. The one-man-one-vote rule adopted by the court destroyed the constitutional compromise which allowed the government to come together initially. As a result, all states are now governed by population only, which delivers all