LETTER: Timing questioned
I write in response to Professor Thomas McAffee’s column last Sunday, “Steering us away from oligarchy.”
The first question that comes to mind is where was all this hand-wringing when President Barack Obama, with the enthusiastic support of Harry Reid and his nuclear option, was packing the Federal courts with regressive statist judges? It isn’t oligarchy that is McAffee’s problem. It’s that the “wrong” oligarchs are in charge.
If the Democrats win control of the Senate in any two-year cycle going forward, the calls for judicial term limits will disappear like puffs of smoke in a breeze.
The anti-Federalists were right about the Judiciary. They complained that there were no checks on judicial power — there aren’t — and this would lead to a society governed by judicial fiat. Despite Alexander Hamilton’s assurances in Federalist 78 that there was nothing to worry about, that the judiciary was clearly the weakest of the three branches because it had no power of the purse or the sword, here we are. We are divided and conquered by a black robed elite proving almost daily how right the anti-Federalists were about the dangers of unchecked power in anybody’s hands for any amount of time.
