Posted 5:09 PM by Robert

Down the Rabbit Hole With the Supreme Court, Again and Again

Patrick Ruffini has an interesting article in National Review Online describing a case in Pennsylvania in which the Supreme Court's apportionment precedent has been used to mask naked incumbent protection.

This kind of judicial/political activism sends a very clear and simple message: the Federal Courts use the sanctimonious, highfalutin and incoherent Supreme Court apportionment precedent to disguise the judiciary's own naked political opportunism. The situation is undoubtedly being aggravated by the declining average quality of the Federal judiciary itself - a decline brought on in large part by the sheer growth in the number of Federal judges and the ongoing and improvident expansion of Federal legislation and the jurisdiction of the Federal courts.

Unless the Court's apportionment precedent is clarified and candidly restructured, the situation will almost certainly continue to deteriorate. As noted in prior posts, the resolution of this crescendo is likely to make the uproar over Bush v. Gore more of whimper than the bang it seemed at its time.