An editorial from The Times West Virginian
FAIRMONT, W.Va. — Our forefathers designed this representative democracy of ours in such a way that no one single branch of government is more powerful than the other and that each branch is held accountable by the people.
There is a system of checks and balances in place to ensure that no one branch becomes more powerful than another.
The people elect members of Congress by popular vote. Congress writes bills that the president must sign into law. Those laws are reviewed, if need be, by the Supreme Court. The president makes appointments to the high court, which must be confirmed by the Senate. It is all spelled out in the Constitution, the living and breathing guide to our kind of democracy.
“As long as judges tinker with the Constitution to ‘do what the people want,’ instead of what the document actually commands, politicians who pick and confirm new federal judges will naturally want only those who agree with them politically,” Scalia told the Philadelphia Bar Association in 2004.
The conservative stalwart appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 was known as an originalist and textualist when it came to his interpretation of the Constitution. That means Scalia believed the Constitution’s meaning was fixed at the time of its writing and that the plain and ordinary meaning of the words should govern the interpretation of it.
With that, we offer a piece from Article II, Section II…
