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Comment by rosser | Hacker News Reader

And this is why America needs a Constitutional Court...

While avoiding broaching the interminable debate on whether or not they're, you know, actually doing their jobs, I thought that was the very definition of SCOTUS.

EDIT: I'm avoiding that debate because ISTM that one's position thereon is most likely a function of their politics, and not of whether or not the sitting justices — let alone the institution, itself — are an adequate implementation of the thing they were intended to be by Article III.

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The fact that courts can declare laws to be unconstitutional is a hack out of Supremacy clause, as decided by the SCOTUS itself in one of the early cases. All other rules still apply, such as proving your standing for harm, which you cannot, if the executive keeps everything secret.

A proper constitutional court (as implemented by many other countries) is much more suited to these kinds of cases, which concern the spirit of Constitution, rather than specifics of harm and injuries to one specific entity.

the case the parent refers to is Marbury V. Madison, where SCOTUS assumes the ability to interpret matters of constitutionality.

Yes, and it appears that America is in need of such a court.

The Supreme Court is nothing more (or less) than the final judicial authority in the United States. They can still only rule on specific cases that happen to get appealed far enough to make it to them.

Courts can strike down unconstitutional sections of law, if they're implicated by a case before them. And the Supreme Court has the final say in a lot of those cases, because they're the final court of appeal. But they aren't a "Constitutional Court" in any direct or immediate way.

I meant that in a very specific way. A "Constitutional Court" is what some countries have to verify the bills passed by Parliaments before they actually become laws.

Think of it as a filter, that filters out all the "crap"/unconstitutional bills that Congress, either out of stupidity, or intentionally, wants to pass.

But these laws can still be found unconstitutional by normal Courts, or the Supreme Court later. The point is to have this so you don't wait 10 years until you even have a judge say if it's constitutional or not, and to stop an out of control government that thinks it can pass whatever it wants, 2 days before Christmas or in New Year's Eve, when no one is paying attention.

By the time the Supreme Court rules on some of those, a lot of damage has already been done, those people might not even be in Congress anymore (so they don't care what they pass), or they probably passed many more laws such as that by then, too, so the Supreme Court will never keep up.

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