Originally Posted by Quentin

You certainly don't have to be a liberal to believe that it is a good thing that we have in this country a process for subjecting statutes to judicial scrutiny. (And if you work in the porn industry, you sure as shit depend on that process for your continued professional survival.)

Let's suppose that someday in the not too distant future, an anti-gun political action group in some state/municipality or another manages to muster enough signatures to get a measure on the ballot to simply outlaw guns in that state/municipality, and let's say that measure then passes by a popular vote.

Let's further suppose that a federal court then rules that state/municipality's new gun law unconstitutional (which it would be, IMO).

Would you complain that the court in the above hypothetical had violated the will of the people, or would you applaud the court for upholding the Constitution? I suspect you would be glad the court had the authority to review the law, and glad that it overturned it, as I would be.

Judicial review of legislative and/or voter action is a good thing, whether or not you or I like any given decision the courts make.

Do judges sometimes (or even often) rule in ways that are contrary to the intent of the Constitution and/or case law/precedent? Of course! Judges are human, and as such they are subject to biases that can cloud their judgment. This is a big part of the reason why our system has multiple checks and multiple layers of overriding authority built in.

At the end of the day, all we can do is set the system up to strongly discourage judicial bias, and have review of lower courts by higher courts in order to increase the likelihood that we catch and correct instances in which political subjectivity has tainted a given court's/judge's decision.

It ain't perfect.... but if you stack our court system up against that of other countries, I think you'll agree our system comes out of that comparison looking relatively good, really.