Andrew Cohen: The Supreme Court: An 'Irresponsible House of Lords'?
[Andrew Cohen has served as chief legal analyst and legal editor for CBS News and won a Murrow Award as one of the nation's leading legal analysts and commentators.]
I am belatedly reading Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt, an absorbing book about the later years of one of the nation's greatest presidents, a dynamo of a man who roamed the Earth and the American political landscape one hundred years ago. Theodore Roosevelt was a "progressive Republican," which today seems more and more like an oxymoron. His bravest speeches, uttered today, would be denounced by Limbaugh and Company as socialist or worse. But on virtually every page of Morris' work there are passages that resonate today....
This week, the Roosevelt epic turned back to domestic matters -- and to the United States Supreme Court which, in the view of the ex-president and his confederates, was excessively pro-corporate and formalistic. One of Roosevelt's muses at the time was a Harvard law professor named Arthur D. Hill, a renowned constitutional scholar. Hill, writes Morris, "compared the Court to 'an irresponsible House of Lords.' Another contemporary voice in Roosevelt's ear was that of Supreme Court Justice Henry Moody, who nonetheless thought that "courts sometimes erred in deciding against the national government."...
Read entire article at The Atlantic
I am belatedly reading Edmund Morris' Colonel Roosevelt, an absorbing book about the later years of one of the nation's greatest presidents, a dynamo of a man who roamed the Earth and the American political landscape one hundred years ago. Theodore Roosevelt was a "progressive Republican," which today seems more and more like an oxymoron. His bravest speeches, uttered today, would be denounced by Limbaugh and Company as socialist or worse. But on virtually every page of Morris' work there are passages that resonate today....
This week, the Roosevelt epic turned back to domestic matters -- and to the United States Supreme Court which, in the view of the ex-president and his confederates, was excessively pro-corporate and formalistic. One of Roosevelt's muses at the time was a Harvard law professor named Arthur D. Hill, a renowned constitutional scholar. Hill, writes Morris, "compared the Court to 'an irresponsible House of Lords.' Another contemporary voice in Roosevelt's ear was that of Supreme Court Justice Henry Moody, who nonetheless thought that "courts sometimes erred in deciding against the national government."...