Specter's Letter to Roberts

Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter sent a letter to court nominee John Roberts in which he indicated that Congress was angry at the fact that the Supreme Court had limited the authority of Congress in the Lopez and Morrison decisions. The letter includes this astonishing statement:

In addition to the commentary of scholars and others about the Supreme Court's judicial activism and the Court's usurping Congressional authority, members of Congress are irate about the Court's denigrating and, really, disrespectful statements about Congress' competence.

It seems to me that the Court has a much stronger case to be made for denigration and attacks upon its authority coming from Congress than vice versa. Do we really need to recount the litany of attacks on the court coming from the Congressional leadership after the Schiavo case? Every time the the Court issues an opinion that Congress doesn't like - or more importantly, where they think they can make political hay out of - they rail against the "judicial activists" on the court. This is true of the Schiavo case (which, thankfully, backfired on them completely because an overwhelming majority of their own constituents rightly believed that Congress should have stayed out of it), the flag burning case and virtually every church/state decision.

What do those cases have in common? They all limited Congressional authority. But in the two cases from the last term for which the Court really deserves enormous criticism, Raich and Kelo, it's telling that Congress was virtually silent. Why? Because both of those decisions upheld the authority of legislators. As long as the ruling preserves Congressional power, Congress is happy - and never mind whether the Constitution grants them that power in the first place. Specter certainly isn't going to complain about the outrageous Raich decision because that decision preserved Congressinoal power - never mind that in doing so they had to completely distort the meaning of the interstate commerce clause to cover actions which are neither interstate nor commerce. So much for the concept of limited government.