President Trump’s second term in office has been marred by activist judges placing injunctions, and partial or full blocks on his agenda. As tiring and counter-productive as their campaign against the will of the American people has been, judicial activism has been a problem for far longer than anyone alive can remember.
The 1857 Dred Scott case not only denied African Americans citizenship, it also struck down a law passed by Congress called the Missouri Compromise. The majority opinion of the court, at that time, used racial assumptions to read into the Constitution that which was not in the text. This judicial overreach inflamed sectional tensions and hastened the American Civil War.
Continue reading “How Originalism Can Restore Constitutional Integrity”