The most interesting moments in yesterday's presidential forum in South Carolina came when the five participating presidential candidates grappled with a question posed by Princeton professor Robert P. George regarding the 14th amendment, the Supreme Court, and the right to life. The conservative professor wanted to know whether the presidential candidates would refuse to abide by the Supreme Court's rulings that declared a constitutional right to abortion and support legislation protecting the right to life of unborn children.
George noted that Congress is authorized to pass legislation enforcing the 14th amendment, which declares that states may not "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." And he quoted Abraham Lincoln's remarks in his first inaugural address responding to the Supreme Court's ruling in Dred Scott: "If the policy of the government upon vitals affecting the whole people is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court, the people will have ceased to be their own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their government into the hands of that eminent tribunal."
Three candidates--Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, and Newt Gingrich--said they would not abide by the court's ruling in Roe v. Wade. "There are a number of issues where the courts have now dramatically usurped their power," said Gingrich. "The idea that the founding fathers also meant to say oh, by the way, by a five to four vote, appointed lawyers can be the equivalent of a constitution convention is an absurdity. All of this starts in 1958 with a Warren Court assertion of supremacy, which is profoundly wrong. The Supreme Court is supreme in the judicial branch, and the judicial branch is one of the three branches. It's the third branch mentioned in the constitution, and in the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton says explicitly it will be the weakest of the three branches."
"I believe the legislative and executive branches have an obligation to defend the constitution against judges who are tyrannical and who seek to impose un-American values on the people of the United States," said Gingrich.
George asked him whether his statements should concern voters that he doesn't respect the independence of the judiciary. "I respect the independence of the judiciary in judging individual cases unless the person doing the judging proves to be so extraordinarily out of the context of the American life and American law that they shouldn't be there," Gingrich replied. "You can't say we have a corrective balance between the three branches, except by the way that these two should never use it. I mean, either there is genuine tension between the three branches and the legislative and executive have a right on occasion to correct the judiciary, or the judiciary is a dominant branch and can dictate to the rest of us. As Speaker Pelosi once said, the Supreme Court speaks it's the voice of god. Well, I don't agree with her."
If the Supreme Court, by a plurality of the justices, may impose their own personal morality on the rest of the nation, then we are quite literally being ruled by those individuals, as opposed to giving our consent to the people's representatives.
So, most assuredly, that power does lie within the representatives and the Senate, the people's representatives in the United States Congress.
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Yesterday's presidential forum in South Carolina was a pretty novel event in GOP presidential politics. Rather than face questioning from the media, five Republican candidates appeared one at a time and each fielded questions for 20 minutes from three stalwart conservatives--Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Congressman Steve King of Iowa, and Professor Robert P. George of Princeton and the National Organization for Marriage.