According to this li
As of 2011, the Chief Justice of the United States receives an annual salary of $223,500, and the Associate Justices receive annual salaries of $213,900.
Think about our current situation. Obamacare is going to cost the American taxpayers trillions of dollars. It is costing us, in all likelihood, hundreds of billions of dollars now. Bureaucracies are being set up, people hired, standards set, regulations written by unelected partisan hacks. Something on the order of the Social Security Administration is being created.
A number of Appellate courts have already found that the insurance mandate is both intrinsic, and unConstitutional. What the fuck are these dumbasses doing? (You will note I don’t swear often, viewing it as superfluous if the verbiage is otherwise accurate; but I have no moral objections to it).
They make the same money that CEO’s of mid-size companies make, and have jobs for life. Why can’t they stop their cribbage game or whatever it is they do all day, and take this up?
I have argued before and will continue to argue that our Constitution became flawed after Marbury v. Madison, an outcome that Jefferson among others anticipated. Specifically, in a system built on checks and balances, there is no remedy to the abuse of the power of the courts.
Abortion, for example, cannot be made illegal anywhere by any legislature, because the Supreme Court determined that hidden somewhere in a secret code only the priests could decipher, the right to abortion was enshrined in a document written in an age when the very concept was not something people mentioned in public.
Patently, they decreased the freedom of Americans to make our own laws. No one can protest. This is the nature of the beast.
Logically, there needs to be a legislative remedy to this situation, and the most sensible one is the ability of Congress to override Supreme Court decisions. The Supreme Court was intended to be the court of last refuge for nationally important cases. It was not intended to create laws that could not be altered by the Will of the People. Such an idea would have been abhorrent to ALL of our Founding Fathers.
As I see it, a two thirds vote in both houses of Congress should be sufficient to strike any specific Supreme Court decision from the record, resetting the case law to its condition prior to that ruling. I am no lawyer, and there may be some smarter way to do this, but something like that is needed.
We also need to create a mechanism by which these retards can be forced to do their jobs over some reasonable time horizon. In issues of profound importance, Congress should be able to order them to hear specific cases, and render decisions within some reasonable amount of time, say 6 months. There is very little which needs to be said that cannot be said in 6 months.
It is said that the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow because they grind exceedingly fine. This may be true, but if the grist is in the other building because the grinder is taking a really long nap, it is not out of order for the more percipient to be angry and wake him the hell up.
I am not particularly grumpy today, but in my more lucid moments I see the extent of the gap between what is possible and what is happening, and it sucks the wind right out of your gut. It makes you dizzy, like standing onthe edge of a very tall cliff.
Why are we doing this to ourselves? Why do we live this way, and not intelligently? Oh, I wish I knew. That is my daily preoccupation.