Let’s face it, Morning Drive is a time of extremes for radio listeners in America today: You’re stuck in your car for a few fleet minutes or monotonous hours as you and 10,000 of your closest friends who eschew public transportation wind your way to work. To escape, you flick on your radio and you get the complete spectrum from Howard Stern to Bible-thumping Baptists to Classic Rock.
And so much of it is just crap, isn’t it? Most of the Howard Stern wannabes continue to disgust us, and shows like Bob and Tom feature the same tired jokes and made-up group dynamics year after year. NPR is a respite from the canned laughter and naked lesbians, though it seems broadcast from Communist China.
So, I expect very little from my morning commute, but the other day on the “Rick ‘N’ Bubba” show on 101.5 here in Lexington, I heard a genuinely provocative topic: Judges are the new lawmakers of America. Think about it: With the president busy with foreign policy and the bureaucracy of the excecutive branch, and the gridlock and pork of the executive branch, the judicial branch is now taking care of the monumental policy decisions of America.
Examples:
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“Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance
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Gay marriage. In Massachusetts, their Supreme Court has all but written the outline of the law they DEMAND the Mass. Legislature pass!
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Abortion rights
At the national level, judges have no accountability to the American people, and that’s scary. Granted, there are times this sort of power has been a good thing: Brown versus Board of Education of Topeka was a landmark case, providing results that never would have been possible to push through the Senate.
My real concern is how broken the checks and balances in the government seem to be: The president seems to have carte blanche to spend our money in whatever way he sees fit, and wage war wherever he feels like it, though neither of these powers are his in the Constitution. The legislature seems to have dropped the ball completely; we have 535 representatives whose sole purpose is to get as much pork from the shank of the government as they can. (Mitch McConnell, are you listening? Senator Byrd?)
I don’t really blame the judiciary: Nature abhors a vacuum, and they’ve expanded to fill it. I do think something should be done to make some guidelines that the Judical Branch is there solely to interpret the laws and the constitution, not make policy.