Quote Originally Posted by John_Wayne777 View Post
I wouldn't agree with that at all.

The Supreme Court...and the judicial system in general...was hijacked by do-gooder progressives during the New Deal. FDR, the closest thing to an American dictator we've seen since King George, tried a court packing scheme and intimidated the court into suddenly seeing license in the Constitution for jailing somebody for selling wheat at below government mandated prices. Progressive activists began slicing the constitution into shreds to achieve outcomes they considered desirable. Examples would be holding that a restaurant's choice in clientele was subject to government regulation because the restaurant was purchasing products of interstate commerce, or holding that a hotel's choice in clientele was subject to government regulation because forbidding certain people from staying at said hotel could adversely impact interstate commerce.

It wasn't until the Rehnquist court that the Supremes returned to the idea that the Constitution placed meaningful limits on the power of the federal government.

The court isn't really "party oriented" as there are numerous examples of the members of the court skewering schemes of either party.
You are absolutely right about the Progressives; one of the fundamental tenants of Progressives at the turn of the last century was to move beyond the Consititution. One of the high-priests of Progressivism, Woodrow Wilson, wrote an article in the late 19th century in which he stated bluntly that the Constitution should no longer be as binding on government power as it once was.
What made the Progressives of the pre-FDR era different , was that they actually tried to pay lip service to the necessity of passing Constitutional Amendments to get done what they wanted. Today's Progressives, beginning with FDR and continuing with LBJ, Carter, Clinton, and now Obama are way past that; the last thing they want is to give any attention to the fact that to change the Constitution, you have to amend it; they just legislate and impose their will regardless of the Constitution--in other words, they are at a point where the checks and balances on government power have waned so thin that, as Fortney Pete Stark said recently, there is nothing that government cannot do. In other words, if government can do it, government should do it, and any pretense of checking the Constitution for authorization of a proposed action is literally laughed at by the likes of Pelosi and Reid.