Supreme irony

I certainly learned a lot about the Constitution and the Supreme Court by reading Will Sutter’s Feb. 28 commentary. Who knew the Supreme Court gave us Donald Trump, voter-ID laws and even those evil Koch brothers?

Wow. The irony is that his thesis seems to be that the Supreme Court needlessly meddles in affairs of state better left to the voters, while he decries the process being used to replace the justice most aligned with that theory of judicial restraint.

In Sutter’s perfect world, the voters’ views, as expressed in the laws produced by elected representatives, would be inviolate. In such a world, states that passed laws prohibiting abortions or requiring identification before voting would not be second-guessed by federal courts.

Likewise, even if politicians of a single party passed a national health-care bill that was uniformly unpopular among their constituents, it would not be subject to any judicial review.

And if a president chose to bypass Congress and legislate with his “pen and telephone,” he would not be questioned by the courts because the people spoke when they sent him to the Oval Office. Sutter should applaud the effort to find a new justice who thinks like Antonin Scalia.

This story was originally published March 11, 2016 at 2:38 PM with the headline "Supreme irony."