I’m sure this confusion over the role of the judiciary wouldn’t have anything to do with Mike Huckabee’s presidential aspirations!
In a recent interview with right-wing radio host Steve Deace, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee claimed that lawmakers may flout court decisions they happen to disagree with:
A president has certainly got to respect a ruling of the court, but if the ruling of a court is wrong, and it’s fundamentally wrong, and you have two branches of the government that determine that it’s wrong, then those other two branches supersede the one. . . . The two branches of government, legislative and executive, have every right to make it clear to the Supreme Court that their interpretation is wrong. And whether they do that by constitutional amendment to spell it out to the court, or by passage of further amplification of law, there are many means, I think, at hand to do that.
Huckabee is, of course, wrong about the separation of powers — and embarassingly so. While Congress does have the authority to overrule court decisions that wrongly interpret its own acts, the whole point of having a Constitution is that it draws lines that can’t be crossed by elected officials. What’s the point of announcing that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” if Congress can ignore any court decision preventing it from establishing a religion?
But that’s exactly how mob mentality works. It’s the argument equivalent of saying “It’s 2 against 1, so we win.” There’s something in the primitive brain that is wired to size up numbers to determine strategy, and the Rs have capitalized on it. Not only does the brain instinctively know that greater numbers equals greater potential for force and coercion, but it also seems to default to greater numbers equals reality equals truth. But this only works for simple systems, not complex ones. (For example, it only takes a handful of banksters with sophisticated software to extract wealth from homeowners coast to coast without breaking a sweat). Now, let it be said that for the latter problem, the originally proposed 11th Amendment would have addressed corporate personhood. But that is another discussion. For the outright problems of sheer democratic numbers, (See: The Back and Forth of Roman governance), the Framers indeed made strategic designs and supposed firewalls, checks and balances among Three branches. But Huck (and his ilk) are still operating in the framework of Might makes Right. Which explains a lot. It’s a battle between built-in defaults of the primitive brain and the strategies born of the frontal lobes, designed to direct those energies into, shall we say, a more sporting and sports’man’like endeavor. The appeal of what Huck is selling is that people don’t have to think beyond simple math. Which explains why they have managed to convince people to vote against their best interests, and by the same token, why left-leaners have yet to fully crack the code of poaching voters from the right-leaning bloc, based on common ground and the Might of the Rule of Law.