> Have you ever practiced law or been involved in it?
As Thomas correctly notes below, yes; that's how I earn my crust. (A lawyer would have looked that up for herself.)
> The judiciary has no real power other than that of apparent authority.
That's not exactly stop-the-presses news. Lawyers generally are taught it during their first week of law school, just in case they missed it in their college Government 101 courses or high-school civics.
> It is an assumed power; an assumption which could just as easily be undone by another accident of history.
True enough, but the system has worked reasonably well for a couple of centuries now, achieving a kind of dynamic stability. (And yes, I'm mindful of those Court decisions that history has rightly come to regard as, how shall I put this, less than successful, such as Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu.)
You're welcome to try to convince ~150 million voters and their elected representatives that a change in the arrangement is warranted. Good luck with that; in fact, good luck even getting their attention, given that all of those folks do have a few other things on their minds. Past attempts to overhaul the arrangement have never caught on and in fact have been viewed with suspicion, for example as FDR learned the hard way when he tried to pack the Court in the mid-1930s.
Great I'm glad you agree with me on the facts. They are hard to disagree with. You and your friend "Thomas" can discuss the matter on your own on why he fails to do so.
I see you also seem to share his predilection for ignoring direct questions the answers to which you do not like and so I shall ask you, apparently an expert, more directly:
What is the actual effect of SCOTUS setting aside as unconstitutional duly passed acts of Congress?
Before you answer consider a study of all the acts of Congress struck by SCOTUS from 1953-1997 and the current status of these statutes as summarized by J Mitchell Pickerell [0] Details can be found by following references in the article which any lawyer (regardless of gender) can find.
> What is the actual effect of SCOTUS setting aside as unconstitutional duly passed acts of Congress?
That's like asking, what is the actual effect of a thunderstorm. The answer is, it depends.
At a minimum, if a government official were to attempt to enforce a law after it had been declared unconstitutional, almost certainly someone would challenge the enforcement attempt in a lower court. (If no one cared, the law wouldn't have ended up in the Supreme Court in the first place.)
The challenge usually will lead to the lower court's issuance of an injunction prohibiting the government official from continuing with his or her attempt to enforce the law. Disobedience of the injunction is punishable as contempt -- as in, the U.S. Marshals will arrest and jail the disobedient official until the contempt is purged. (I don't have time to go into the details of the contempt process.) I can't remember that ever happening, because the Court's power to declare a statute unconstitutional is essentially universally accepted as a practical matter, even though some theorists challenge it from time to time.
Sometimes the Court rules that the unenforceability is retroactive; this can create practical problems, but institutionally the Court is fully aware of that and takes it into account.
Other times the Court will say that the unenforceability is prospective only, that is, existing actions aren't to be disturbed.
Incidentally, the article by Pickerill (not Pickerell) that you cite doesn't support your view. The article lists the various ways in which Congress has deferred to the Court's rulings, that is, acceded to the Court's authority. For example, Congress might amend an unconstitutional statute to fix the constitutionality problems, or it might repeal the statute entirely.
As Thomas correctly notes below, yes; that's how I earn my crust. (A lawyer would have looked that up for herself.)
> The judiciary has no real power other than that of apparent authority.
That's not exactly stop-the-presses news. Lawyers generally are taught it during their first week of law school, just in case they missed it in their college Government 101 courses or high-school civics.
> It is an assumed power; an assumption which could just as easily be undone by another accident of history.
True enough, but the system has worked reasonably well for a couple of centuries now, achieving a kind of dynamic stability. (And yes, I'm mindful of those Court decisions that history has rightly come to regard as, how shall I put this, less than successful, such as Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu.)
You're welcome to try to convince ~150 million voters and their elected representatives that a change in the arrangement is warranted. Good luck with that; in fact, good luck even getting their attention, given that all of those folks do have a few other things on their minds. Past attempts to overhaul the arrangement have never caught on and in fact have been viewed with suspicion, for example as FDR learned the hard way when he tried to pack the Court in the mid-1930s.