Word: anticourt
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What started the anticourt drive was conservative anger at federal court opinions that, among other things, legalized abortion, outlawed school prayer and supported the use of busing to achieve desegregation. Even before those rulings were handed down, conservative wrath had been aroused by the federal judiciary's strong protection of the rights of defendants and its uncertain approach to pornography. And conservatives have never been happy about the modern judiciary's penchant for the sort of activism that has prompted some federal judges, like Frank Johnson of Alabama, to take over the administration of prisons or busing programs...
...Democratic Congressman William Kastenmeier, the enactment of even one measure that would cripple the Supreme Court in even one area would be a dangerous precedent-an invitation to Congress to turn itself into a sort of Supersupreme Court over the Supreme Court. Says Kastenmeier, a leading foe of the anticourt crusade: "If Congress can decide willy-nilly that the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts have no appellate jurisdiction, then we have arrogated to ourselves considerable power...
...within Congress have over and over again tried to hobble or thwart the federal judiciary-liberals in the 1920s when the high court kept striking down their measures outlawing child labor, conservatives in the mid-century years when the Supreme Court struck down some state antisubversion laws. But the anticourt propositions of these and other factions were never enacted by the whole Congress...
...certain, given the new conservative atmosphere, that opponents could vote down the measures in the House. The issue will possibly be decided by the Administration; though it generally tilts to the conservative side of the so-called moral issues, the Administration has so far withheld forthright support of the anticourt campaign partly because of genuine doubts about its constitutionality and also out of fear of endangering the congressional consensus on economic issues...
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