44 AMP said:
...SCOTUS upheld slavery, SCOTUS upheld the interment of Japanese in (concentration) camps. SCOTUS has upheld a number of very bad things over the years, and only SOME of those things have been redressed by later court rulings. ...
But it's really not the proper role of a court to decide if the result is good or bad. Courts decide cases, and it's the job of a court to apply the the law and applicable precedent to decide the case. That is the nature of an exercise of judicial power. The result of applying the law and precedent can in fact be unsatisfactory. We could think that a law is a bad idea or bad public policy, and that law could be entirely within the power of Congress to enact and perfectly constitutional. Being constitutional does not guarantee that a law is a good thing.
It is also a well settled principle of law that the courts give deference to legislative acts and presume statutes valid and enforceable. As the Supreme Court said in
Brown v. State of Maryland, 25 U.S. 419 (1827), at 437:
...It has been truly said, that the presumption is in favour of every legislative act, and that the whole burden of proof lies on him who denies its constitutionality....
And much more recently in
U.S. v Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000):
...Due respect for the decisions of a coordinate branch of Government demands that we invalidate a congressional enactment only upon a plain showing that Congress has exceeded its constitutional bounds. See United States v. Lopez, 514 U.S., at 568, 577_578 (Kennedy, J., concurring); United States v. Harris, 106 U.S., at 635. With this presumption of constitutionality in mind, we turn to the question whether §13981 falls within Congress' power under Article I, §8, of the Constitution....
If an application of the law by a court produces a bad result, the fault lies with the law.
We still elect our legislators and executive officers. And the separation of powers/checks and balances works. So a court might override a statute, but sometimes the legislature then overrides the court. I often cite the case of
Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005) as an example of this phenomenon. It was a ruling on a technical point of eminent domain law (specifically involving the "takings" clause of the Fifth Amendment applied to the States through the 14th Amendment and the meaning of "public use"). The result was found to be unsatisfactory by many. As a consequence, the legislatures of 42 States revised those States' eminent domain laws to avoid a
Kelo result. "Checks and balances" at work.
Whenever a court makes a major decision that one disagrees with, the judicial system is broken and the judges corrupt. Whenever a court makes a major decision that one agrees with, the judges are great scholars (except any dissenters, who are corrupt), and our courts are the last bulwark against the machination of the political toadies bought and paid for by special interests. There has been, and probably always will be, a huge negative reaction by a large number of people to every important to the public Supreme Court decision. There are plenty of folks who loved
Roe v. Wade and hated
Heller, and perhaps as many who hated
Roe v. Wade and loved
Heller.
