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House Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
House of Representatives
Session of 2015 - 2016
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | June 26, 2015 12:37 PM |
|---|---|
| From: | Representative Tim Krieger |
| To: | All House members |
| Subject: | Request to Cosponsor Resolution - Role of Courts |
| Today, the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 5-4 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, departed from both legal judgment and precedent and took the extraordinary step of “constitutionalizing” marriage and ordering every state not only to recognize marriages lawfully entered into in other states, but also to license same-sex marriage in their own states. This decision overturns not only millennia of religious and social tradition, but also hundreds of years of constitutional and legal tradition. In Federalist Paper No. 78, Alexander Hamilton wisely said that the Court should have no will, but only judgment. But once again, the Supreme Court has departed from the founding fathers’ restrained conception of the judicial role. I think Justice Scalia said it best in his dissenting opinion: “Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court. The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention. This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.” I believe that the people of people have a right to affect public policy change, if they so choose, through the formulation of laws by their elected representatives in the General Assembly. I invite you to join me in co-sponsoring a resolution which examines the proper roles of each of the three co-equal branches of government and the powers retained by the states under the federal Constitution, and calling for a respectful and serious public debate on the proper role of the judiciary in the formulation of public policy. |
Introduced as HR420