Anna Quindlen would surely suffer heartburn if she realized that one of her Newsweek columns offered a great justification for the judicial philosophy of ?originalism.?
Perhaps she ought to reach for the antacid:
Congress chips away at legislation, then sends some lowest-common-denominator version to the White House, to be signed or vetoed or later redesigned by the next president to take up temporary residence in Washington. But the work of the high court has had vast systemic influence over the lives of all Americans, an effect that lasts through generations. In the tripartite tussle, it’s no contest: SCOTUS rules.
The only unelected branch of the federal government doesn?t have to ?rule.? Instead, Supreme Court justices could tie their own hands by adopting an originalist approach to their work. Associate Justice Antonin Scalia explained the theory during a North Carolina appearance last fall.
