We can only pray that the members of the Supreme Court will remember that they are there only to rule on the constitutionality of a problem--not the morality of it, as the President wants.
"It's a preliminary decision, but it recognizes that there continue to be problems with the constitutionality of this revised order, particularly with discriminatory intent toward Muslims," said Betsy Fisher, policy director at the International Refugee Assistance Project at the Urban Justice Center.
Even if the bill had passed, it would likely have run up against problems over its constitutionality, as Talking Points Memo's Brian Beutler pointed out.
Justice Kennedy, along with Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. all asked questions suggesting that they had a problem with the constitutionality of the mandate requiring most Americans to buy insurance.
The problem is that constitutionality is sometimes in the eye of the beholder, and attorneys general are political creatures who might be inclined to use this new power on behalf of the proposals they like and against the ones they don't.
If we adopt Justice Breyer's theory of interpretation, then, we can find a way round the problem: a test of constitutionality is whether deciding the other way would threaten civil peace.
In March, Tomblin rejected a measure to ban abortions after 20 weeks, citing problems with the proposal's constitutionality.
It eliminated those provisions of the earlier Act and made other substantive and structural changes. 1 The basic problem here involved is the constitutionality of the 1937 Act.
"It strikes me as ironic that the first question is constitutionality from a press that has no problem demonizing firearms," Pitts told the Charleston paper.
The biggest problem, though, is the law's questionable constitutionality.
