In the last eight papers, we concentrated on the Supreme Court's responsibility for five deleterious consequences, borne by our citizens due to abuses and usurpations perpetrated under our Constitution. We discussed how these unwanted and unintended consequences occurred. Some of the most serious instances were cited. Now, what can we do about it?

The origin of the Court's present power is traced in Leon Friedman's book "The Supreme Court", from which the following extracts are taken:

"[Chief Justice John] Marshall's decision [in Marbury v. Madison in 1803] established the following three propositions that became the basis for the Supreme Court's special role in our government:

"Third, the Supreme Court could declare an act of Congress unconstitutional as part of its responsibility to interpret the Constitution and to define its terms authoritatively." ....

"At first, not everyone accepted these propositions. President Thomas Jefferson objected to the idea that the courts are ultimately responsible for interpreting the Constitution. He questioned the notion that judges alone should be the 'ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions' and called it a 'very dangerous doctrine indeed.' President Andrew Jackson agreed. After a dispute with the Court, he stated that it is the duty of the other branches of government 'to decide upon the constitutionality of any bill or resolution.'

Eventually, Marshall's view prevailed. Years later, the Supreme Court wrote that 'the federal judiciary is SUPREME in the exposition of the law of the Constitution.'"

Prescience of needs to check the power of the federal Judiciary was expressed in two historic papers cited in Mortimer J. Adler's book "We Hold These Truths." First, from an anonymous anti-federalist essay (Brutus No. 11) of January 31, 1788:

"The judicial power will operate to effect, in the most certain but yet silent and imperceptible manner, what is evidently the tendency of the Constitution: I mean, an entire subversion of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers of the individual states. Every adjudication of the Supreme Court on any question that may arise upon the nature and extent of the general government will affect the limits of the state jurisdiction. In proportion as the former enlarge the exercise of their powers will that of the latter be restricted.

That the judicial power of the United States will lean strongly in favor of the general government, and will give such an explanation to the Constitution as will favor an extension of its jurisdiction, is very evident ...."

Second, from Thomas Jefferson's letter to Francis Hopkinson, March 13, 1789, after the new government had begun to function:

"I approved, from the first moment, of the great mass of what is in the new Constitution: .... ; the qualified negative on laws given the executive, which, however, I should have liked better if associated with the judiciary also, .... "

When any governing entity (whether 1, 9, 50, 100, or 435 in number) is given SUPREME (greatest, utmost, or extreme) and unchecked power, the result is abuses and usurpations; invalidation of the Constitution; and, over time, degradation of We the People. This is what has occurred in the SUPREME and unchecked exposition by the Supreme Court of the vague and general clauses of the Constitution.

It should not have happened. Even without a veto power against the Judiciary, timely application by the other two branches of the checks and balances could have restrained an activist Supreme Court. Timely governance by our Presidents and our Congresses could have stemmed the drift of We the People into a malaise of greed and self-gratification brought on, or abetted, by Supreme Court legislation of rights and privacies not found in the Constitution.

Oh, yes! There has been (including the 1992 election campaigns) much political rhetoric lamenting the results of this drift. But what have we gotten (and what will result from the 1992 election-as-usual)? ANSWER: likely a do-nothing or do-little President and Congress; a still SUPREME Supreme Court; and the continued degradation of our country!

How can the Court be made to harken to the Constitution? The Congress (and a State legislature) has the ready means of rewriting and reenacting laws to overcome legitimate (unchallenged) findings of unconstitutionality by the Court. At the other extreme, our founding fathers provided an explicit (but difficult and time consuming) means to check lack of judicial restraint by the Supreme Court. That is by amendment of the Constitution.

Unfortunately our nation has been very reluctant to employ this privilege and responsibility. Instead we have borne the penalties of inaction and delayed actions: civil war; 26 million aborted lives; crippling immorality; uncontrolled crime; daily deaths, fear and trepidation, and compromise of freedoms due to unrestricted proliferation of guns; etc. Only four times in our history has the country disapproved of Supreme Court decisions and overruled them by passing the Eleventh, Fourteenth, Sixteenth, and Twenty-sixth Amendments to the Constitution.

We the People should heed the advice of President George Washington in his Farewell Address in 1796: "If, in the opinion of the people, the distribution or modification of the constitutional powers be in any particular wrong, let it be corrected by an amendment in the way which the Constitution designates..."

The nineteenth century statement by the Supreme Court, that it "is SUPREME in the exposition of the law of the Constitution," should no longer be allowed to stand. Under certain conditions, no branch of the federal government should be deemed to speak last. Members of Congress, the President, and the executive agencies must interpret the Constitution almost daily in carrying out their duties. When they deem that the Judiciary has exceeded its role of JUDGEMENT, and has in effect violated the checks and balances, timely action should be required to nip the woeful results in the bud.

The Supreme Court's SUPREMENESS may be successfully challenged by the normal passage of joint resolutions or bills which override, qualify, or limit the precedent that would have been set by the Supreme Court's finding. But just in case a standoff may result, an Amendment should be initiated NOW to establish a veto power against the Court by a 2/3s vote of the Congress and concurrence of the President.

Our nation can ill afford, indeed may not survive, the degradation that it has effected in the past 30 years. Never again should the hands be tied of, or the excuse given to, the President and the Congress to not give good government to We the People.

In the next essay, we will complete the answer to the question posed at the outset of this paper and then go on to the other two questions concerning the Court.