Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who's the fairest one of all?
Answer: A five-person majority on the Supreme Court, of course.
The answer to your question is, quite simply: when the courts tell us it's time for a change. Scalia may be a bit of a trog, but he's no fool, either. He thinks that a strict constructionist has the best chance of succeeding Renquist, which in the current state of our Union is probably true. And strict constructionists are, by their very nature, less amenable to the sort of reconstruction that the majority (or perhaps plurality would be a better term) on the court undertook with this landmark decision.
I'm not interested in getting into a political argument in this forum (I don't live ALL that far from Ms. Jackie, yunnerstand), but your question bears answering since it's an important one not only for our government but for the world as well, since, like it or not, our government holds great sway in the way the nations of the world work together or, sadly, fight with one another.
So please, people, let's keep the discussion narrowly focused here.
In its history, the Supreme Court has been very slow at overturning itself, and this recent trend certainly seems to signal that this conservative approach to stare decisis may be on the verge of a complete rethinking by the court.
An example of the other side of that same coin is the case of the two former CIA spies who were promised lifetiem income from the CIA in return for their spying for our country. The CIA reneged on its promise and the spies sued, only to have their case thrown out because spies don't have standing to sue in cases such as this, since to allow the case to go forward could conceivably damage national security. This is based on a case broght by one of Lincoln's personally recruited spies, whose pension was stopped after Lincoln's murder. The Supreme Court ruled that allowing the suit to go into court would breach a secrecy oath undertaken by the President, and that decision was used this week to throw out the case against the CIA.
Even though the potential plaintiffs argued (and I thought fairly convincingly) that it was possible to prosecute the case without revealing any secrets, the Court held that their decision from hmmm sometime in the 1870s or 80s, I expect, would be allowed to control.
It will be interesting to see what happens when, as it must, the court considers gay marriages, since the conservatives will be able to point to this decision and say that emerging community standards forbid gay marriages. Should be quite a tapdance for the court should it choose to allow gay marriages in a test between the 8th and 14th amendments.
TEd
