Chief Justice William Rehnquist has released his annual report on the state of the judiciary, and I was glad to see that he made a point of responding to growing threats to the independence of the courts. With no fewer than four bills pending in Congress that would attempt to strip the court of jurisdiction in various types of cases, there is a very real threat of a constitutional crisis brewing. Rehnquist points out that there is a long history of tension between Congress and the Judiciary, going back as far as the attempted impeachment of Chief Justice Samuel Chase in 1805, and that to some degree that tension is healthy. He also points out that attempts to usurp judicial authority has also been attempted when the shoe was on the other foot, particularly when FDR attempted to pack the court in order to change the decisions that had increasingly gone against him. Today it is the right that seeks to subvert the authority of the courts. Rehnquist concludes, "No doubt the federal Judiciary, including the Supreme Court, will continue to encounter challenges to its independence and authority because of dissatisfaction with particular decisions or the general direction of its jurisprudence. Let us hope that the Supreme Court and all of our courts will continue to command sufficient public respect to enable them to survive basic attacks on the judicial independence that has made our judicial system a model for much of the world." I couldn't agree more.
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