To me, the most amazing thing about judicial arrogance is the fact that the Executive and Legislative branches let them get away with it. Someday, somebody is going to have to tell a court that's issued a particularly outrageous decision in an area in which it has either no jurisdiction or no competence to take a flying leap.

The Executive has the inherent power to do that. As does any Legislature. What Presidents, Governors, Senators, Congressmen, and Assemblymen seem to lack is any sense of the proper limits and extent of the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial powers. Arlen Specter is only one of many people in government who haven't the slightest clue who the system is supposed to work.

It is absolutely improper--under our system of government a heresy, really--for any judge to presume to make policy decisions. That's the reason Roe v. Wade is bad law. It's why Dred Scott was bad law. It's why Lochner was bad law.

Every time a court attempts to remove a political question from the arena of politics, bad things result.

You'd think they'd have learned that lesson by now.

But they haven't.

Consider what purpose an invocation of the Constitution as the basis for a judge's opinion actually serves. Whether or not what the judge asserts is contained in a Constitution is actually contained therein, a deferential Executive and Legislature will thereafter act as if it were.

This is a gross abrogation of the Executive and Legislative oaths of office. The oaths require officers of the government to preserve and protect not what judges say the Constitution is, but to preserve and protect what it actually is.

And it's long past time for the President to explain this to the American people.

Dennis Mallonee