Opening Word document…

Other branches will support the courts.

Lawrence Baum 3. Professor of political science at the Ohio State University. June. “The Supreme Court In Amerian Politics.” Annual Review of Political Science, Vol. 6, 161-180. Annual Reviews.

It is also worth asking why the Court fares so well in Congress. As noted above, few of the Court's most controversial interventions in the past half century have been directly reversed. Nor has Congress enacted any of the numerous bills to remove the Court's jurisdiction over areas in which the Court has aroused congressional anger. A large part of the explanation lies in the difficulty of enacting legislation in a process with so many veto points. That difficulty is especially great in an era like the current one, which lacks a strong or stable law-making majority. In such an era, interventions are likely to have significant support in government regardless of their ideological direction, and even decisions that strike down federal laws may enjoy majority support. The line of decisions since 1995 that has limited the regulatory power of the federal government (e.g., Alden v. Maine 1999, United States v. Morrison 2000) constitutes the most significant judicial attack on federal policy since the 1930s. But since 1995, Congress has had Republican majorities except for the bare Democratic Senate majority in 2001–2002. In that situation, any significant action to counter the Court's policies has been exceedingly unlikely.

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