The Political Structure: The Case in opposition to Judicial Supremacy

Who ought to determine what’s constitutional? The Supreme Court docket, after all, each liberal and conservative voices say—however in a bracing critique of the “judicial engagement” that’s ascendant on the authorized proper, Greg Weiner makes a cogent case on the contrary. His ebook,
The Political Structure, is an eloquent political argument for the restraint of judicial authority and the return of the correct portion of constitutional authority to the folks and their elected representatives. What Weiner requires, briefly, is a reconstitution of the political commons upon which a republic stands.

On the root of the phrase “republic” is what Romans referred to as the res publica, or the general public factor. And it’s exactly this—the sense of a political group partaking in choices about frequent issues as a coherent entire—that Weiner fears is misplaced when all constitutional authority is ceded to the judiciary. His ebook calls as an alternative for a type of republican constitutionalism that rests on an understanding that arguments about constitutional that means are, in the end, political arguments. What this requires is an enlargement of the res publica, the area allotted to political dialog and a shared pursuit of frequent issues. Tracing the political and judicial historical past by which this vital political area has been impoverished,
The Political Structure seeks to get well the sense of political group on which the well being of the republic, and the true working that means of the Structure, rely.