The High Court: A User’s Guide

Marbury v. Madison in 1803 was the Supreme Court assuption of power undeclared in the Constitution of the United States.
That assumption of power has provided so called courts, at every level, with the assumption that they have the power to dictate local laws. Regardless of jury decisions. The fundamental rule of trial by jury was the concept of a trial by your peers...that means those that know you. In the old days that was the local butcher, baker, housewife and drinking buddies...but the system has become so perverted these days that now trials are with juries that DON'T know you, and have been carefully screened down to those dumb enough to be swayed by lawyers and judges.
No longer do juries not only determine guilt, they are actively discouraged from determing if the punishment suits the crime or if the punishment is even within the scope of justice.
All courtesy of your local trial lawyers association, who supports which party?
Your article is patently biased.
When will true Journalism ever return to America?!

Hey NewsWeak...."all the Justices are white/old or both" Clarence Thomas was black, last time I looked. Ya'll are no longer even close to being unbiased and credible. That's why this toilet paper magazine is DEEP IN THE RED.

NOBAMA!!!

Regardless of what you think about the author's politcal views, or her use of grammar, her main argument is valid - it is very likely that the next president will have an opportunity to alter the make-up of the present Supreme Court to a very large degree.

For this reason, and this reason alone, she is quite correct - the vote you cast will have historic consequences.

Use it wisely.

She was trying to make a point that very few minorities are on the Court. Not start a semantic fight over the definition of Old. And if not for Ginsburg there woulnd't be any minorities on the court. Thomas is unqualified to be on the court and is whiter than I am and I'm caucasian.

I would think that if Newsweek gives you an entire page to give the reader a "User's Guide" to the Supreme Court, you would at the very least get the facts right. You tell us the all the justes are white! Excuse my impudence, but have you looked at a picture of the nine justices?

What Newsweek editor allowed this column to be printed with such a glaring factual error?

Actually, demhill (or should we call you dimwit), any intelligent educated person that knbows anything about US history and Constitutional law (something you are quite obviosuly completely ignorant of) are actually far more America Lovers than you can ever be. If you want to be in a nation like the one Bush and Cheney are trying to create go to Saudi Arabia, Iran or Saddam's Iraq. Our founding fathers knew that executive tyranny (the perfect definition of Bush II) is an ultimate evil.

I have done my homework. Most skilled consitutional theorists would laugh in your face (or vomit at your treason).

Only in America can yoou keep a job for LIFE even if senile, suffering from alzheimer's, or as proven in the last two rulings, COMPLETELY INSANE!


GOD BLESS AMERICA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Laughing stock of the world.

Neocon, you posted only one of Jeffersons statements regardeng religion. He communicated frequently by writing with John Adams on multiple topics of which religion was one. Much of the following is quoted from David Ignatius who you can contact at davidignatius@washpost.com. The Founders were men of Enlightment - supreme rationalists who would have found the religiosity of much of our modern political life quite abhorrent. It's not that these men didn't have religious beliefs: They were, to their deaths, passonate seekers of truth, metaphysical as well as physical. It's that their beliefs didn't fit into pious cubbyholes. Politicians and commentators have suggested that for the Founders the very idea of freedom was God-given - or, as the Declaration of Independence puts it, that human beings are "endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights." Yet this famous passage begins with a distillation of Enlighhrenment's celebration of human reason: "We hold these truths to be self-evident. . . "Jefferson wrote of "true religion" as based on "moral precepts innate in man, and the "sublime doctrine of philanthropism and deism tought us by Jesus of Nazareth." But jefferson warned that if the sectarian (church) version prevailed, then he might agree with Adams that "this would be the best of all posslible worlds if there were no religion in it." The Founder certainly believed in God, but for most of them, their faith was a deeply private matter "known to my God and myself alone." Religious conservatives like to stress their connection to ehe Founders and to the republic's birth as "one nation under God." But a reading of the Adams-Jefferson letters is a reminder that, in this debate, the Founders - as men of the Enlightment - would surely have sided with the party of Reason

Well, the article gets one thing right for sure...this election is absolutely crucial to the future of the Supreme Court. It is already bad enough that Bush got to replace O'Connor, who was the other swing vote with Kennedy for years. Bush has been able to put 2 ultra conservative judges on to go with Thomas and Scalia. McCain has admitted in no uncertain terms what is judge appointing strategy is. If McCain is elected, you can say goodbye to Roe v. Wade and you can also say goodbye to any average citizen standing a chance against Goliath (private and governmental)

And by the way....all political posturing aside, we are one of the few countries left that use the death penalty and go ahead and take a look at the list of countries on the same list as us in continuing to execute people and also go ahead and take a long, long look at the list of people who have been exonerated off death row after spending 10, 15, 20 years there. Sure, if someone harms my kid, I might well Ellie Nessler them, but I do not want the courts executing them, let them wither away in prison for 20, 30, 50 years. As for today's gun decision, it is what I expected from this current court, but I still feel that the 2nd Amendment simply does not say what the NRA wants it to say. Some historical context may help, but most people in this country do not bother to have any of that.

I cannot even fathom that with all that is at stake, McCain is polling anything above 10%. Sometimes I really wish we let the South go 140 years ago.