Today President Trump is set to make his most important nomination to date. At 8pm EST the President will hold a press conference to announce his pick for the empty Supreme Court seat left by the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Republicans are hopeful Trump will nominate a staunch conservative in the mold of Justice Scalia; Democrats are terrified of the same thing and have vowed to do everything they can to block it.
The Supreme Court nomination was one of the hottest issues during the presidential election last year. Voters understood that the Supreme Court has given itself massive amounts of power, and no one wanted the other party’s candidate to tip the ideological balance in their favor.
The Supreme Court itself admitted in 1992 that judges have given the federal government far more power than the Framers ever imagined. A significant liberal or conservative majority on the bench would have the power to change the fate of our nation for generations to come. As the Court said in New York v. United States,
This framework has been sufficiently flexible over the past two centuries to allow for enormous changes in the nature of government. The Federal Government undertakes activities today that would have been unimaginable to the Framers in two senses; first, because the Framers would not have conceived that any government would conduct such activities; and second, because the Framers would not have believed that the Federal Government, rather than the States, would assume such responsibilities. Yet the powers conferred upon the Federal Government by the Constitution were phrased in language broad enough to allow for the expansion of the Federal Government’s role.
But what if there was another way? What if the Court’s power could be limited as the Founders intended and it didn’t matter so much which party nominated which judge?
That is precisely what the Convention of States Project seeks to accomplish. The Supreme Court’s power has grown out of control, and the only way to rein it in is through constitutional amendments. But these constitutional amendments will never come from Congress. Only the people, acting through their state legislatures, can propose the necessary amendments to bring the Court back in line with the Constitution.
