What you also fail to realize is this "vote new members in" mentality is bullcrap in the House where more than 90% of the house has safe seats thanks to gerrymandering. It is effectively impossible to make change in the House. In the Senate it is different, and you have a point there, but you should note that point.
I agree. With a two year term, a Representative can never stop raising funds and campaigning. With a six year term, Senators have a bit more breathing room. In any event, both have three primary considerations. Getting re-elected, pork, and pleasing their benefactors. Everything else comes after that.
The solution, as I see it, is term limits. Perhaps four or five terms for Representatives and two terms for Senators. Fresh blood, fresh ideas, less time to become 'pocketed', as it were.
A jurists responsibility is to examine the case in front of them. They look at the facts, they look at the case law, and then they look at the constitution and amms. After that they make a decision, and then set out to write the opinion. In this opinion, they create a stance, find case law to support it and then write it up. Now, some justices take it upon themselves to consider public sentiment as a sort of case law to help justify their opinion, and none of the jurists on the Supreme Court are immune from it, from Scalia, to O'Connor, to Breyer. They use all that is before them, that can even include international law to help justify their opinion, not make it. That is the important distinction.
Public opinion has no place in the decision making of a USCC Justice. Nor should the laws of any foreign country.
The court is very pragmatic in the changes it instills, and we would hope it to be because they are very wise (usually) and very legally versed. They know what to do and will not do it, as you said, on a whim. They will be pragmatic and very thoughtful in response to each and every case, and if they consider public sentiment to be a part of it, they will include it. That simple. Do you cry foul when Scalia cites the public and the founders? I would tend to think not, but for another view...Fant?
I won't offer an opinion to the contrary. Let it suffice that even learned folks on opposite sides of a question cross over when they see a question that they believe was wrongly decided.
I won't give you a link because the discussion would then shift to the merits of the source instead of the material being presented.
I was particularly surprised to read the comments attributed to Ruth Ginsberg and Alan Dershowitz.
The Senate hearing referred to was held last month with little or no publicity, either before or after.
Senator Brownback Sets Sights on Roe
by Pete Winn, associate editor
Kansas senator to hold hearings on whether the Supreme Court's infamous 1973 abortion ruling may have been bad law after all.
U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback believes a hearing he's holding Thursday on Capitol Hill could eventually lead to the overturning of the Supreme Court's infamous Roe v. Wade decision.
Brownback, R-Kan., will convene the Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights subcommittee to examine the consequences of Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, the other 1970s-era Supreme Court decision that helped give America abortion on demand.
"A number of legal scholars both from the left and the right believe that Roe v. Wade is badly decided law, so we're going to start going at the core issue of Roe and this decision," Brownback told CitizenLink. "I believe you'll see Roe v. Wade overturned."
Norma McCorvey (the "Jane Roe" of Roe v. Wade) and Sandra Cano ("Jane Doe" of Doe v. Bolton) are expected to be witnesses at the hearing. Though they were used three decades ago by pro-abortion attorneys to advance the leftist agenda, both women have become pro-life—and denounced the very decisions now identified by their pseudonyms.
Also expected to testify: Dr. Ken Edelin, associate dean of the Boston University School of Medicine; Teresa Collett, professor of law at the University of St. Thomas Law School in Minneapolis; M. Edward Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.; R. Alta Charo, professor of law and bioethics and associate dean for research and faculty development at the University of Wisconsin Law School in Madison, Wis.; and Karen O'Connor, professor of government at American University, Washington, D.C.
Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said it's about time such a hearing was scheduled.
"It's a dirty little secret of the legal profession that (Justice) Harry Blackmun's opinion in Roe v. Wade was not very rich in constitutional underpinnings," Hausknecht explained. "It looked for a result and struggled to obtain that any way it could."
The real question, though, is can Roe v. Wade really be overturned?
"All an overturning of Roe v. Wade would do," Hausknecht said, "is put the whole issue back in the 50 state legislatures—where it belongs, anyway. That's something that most conservatives are comfortable with.
"Ultimately, I want to see abortion gone from all 50 states, but it's important to eliminate this as a federal 'constitutional right'—which has been the effect of Roe v. Wade."
It's no surprise that conservative jurists tend to think Roe is bad law. Indeed, three of the high court's sitting justices—Chief Justice Rehnquist, Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence Thomas—have all said they think Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided.
Slightly more surprising, according to Hausknecht, is the fact that liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz also think Roe was bad law.
In a March 2005 speech at the University of Kansas, Ginsburg, a former American Civil Liberties Union attorney, said Roe was decided in a way which forbids any regulation or restriction of abortion—something which "seemed to me not the way courts generally work."
As for Dershowitz, in his book, "Supreme Injustice," the famous pro-abortion liberal scion compared Roe v. Wade to the Bush v. Gore decision that decided the outcome of the 2000 presidential election—blasting both rulings as instances where politics became wrongly inserted into the courts.
