Thursday, January 23, 2020

Separation of Powers

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, from his book A Republic, If You Can Keep It:

"Who, after all, would hire nine people to write laws for a continental nation and then insulate them from any electoral accountability? Let alone pick for the job nine lawyers from fancy law schools, with a majority from East Coast urban centers? That sounds more like the monarchy the Constitution rejected than the republic it ordained." (p. 134)

"Legislators are responsive to their constituents and have institutional resources designed the help them discern and enact majoritarian preferences. Politically insulated judges come armed with only the attorneys' briefs, a few law clerks, and their own idiosyncratic experiences. They are hardly the representative group you'd expect (or want) to be making empirical judgments for hundreds of millions of people." (p. 157)

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