Random Reflections

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 378, 9 March 1937, Page 3

Random Reflections

By

“JOPPA.”

You may be wondering what the trouble is in the U.S.A, between the President and the Judges of the Federal Supreme Court. It is a complicated problem and many students of the American Constitution have been expecting a clash for years past. Now that the tremendous natural resources of the Republic, which have been on the whole wantonly wasted, are coming to an end and its people have to face some grim economic realities, the amazingly complicated system of government with which the UJS.A. is burdened, will have to be overhauled. Each of the 50 States of the Union is a sovereign State, reserving to itself final authority on many matters of government. In addition every town in the U-S.A. ■with a city charter has a legislative body with usually two chambers and capable of making laws.- for its territory. The result is that the U.S.A, is covered "with an Intricate network of often conflicting statute law, varying in force from Acts of Congress to resolutions of aldermaric boards.”, and there is no co-ordinating authority to lick them into a unity. Also the Federal Government is bound by a written Constitution by which certain powers and those powers alone are delegated to it. “All powers of legislation and government not expressly delegated to the Federal Government by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States or to the people.” When the Constitution was drawn UP after the Revolution the citizens oi the newly-freed country were most suspicious or Government. Accordingly they decided to make any government to which they submitted as ineffective as possible toy a rigid division of power. The executive was vested in a President with hiv Cabinet, whom he chooses, but he, had no connection or place in the legislature. He is an entirely different kind of ruler to a British Prime Minister. The legislative power is vested in a Congress of two Houses, certain rights beinig reserved to each House apart from and never against the other branch of the legislature’ and against the President. Often the executive may be quite out of touch with the legislature. For instance taxes are levied by tihe legislature ■without any particular regard to the needs of the executive. There is nothing corresponding to our Budget in American parliamentary practice. That is why a deficit or a surplus on the year’s national working has no particular economic significance. Then above all and apart from all is

the Federal Supreme Court which ■ has the duty and right of judging whether any law or executive act is within the terms of the Constitution. The same authority is vested in the Supreme Courts of each of the States in regard to State legislation. That is, the Courts of the U.S.A, have a double function —they not only administer the lav.', but thjey decide what is to be the law. They have not only power to interpret a law by their decisions but they can annul any law pased on the ground that it is contrary to the Constitution. So tha.t the final word in the U.S.A, is not with the people’s elected representatives but is based on an unwritten law, on a series of ideas and theories of the limitation of the rights of government, developed from the mind of the judges, and in practice “bated on the twin ideas of preserving order and upholding certain principles of personal rights and liberties presumed to be established by the American Constitution.” It hat’ always been a Conservative influence and steadily set against any effort to bring new ideas into expression. This was most apparent after the Civil War, when a whole series of Reconstruction Acts aiming at giving the Negro equal rights with the whites was nullified by decisions of the Courts. What this method meuns is that as Federal Court judges are generally about 70 not out in age, the effort of this generation to develop national life in accord with new ideas and ideals, is continually being thwarted by the fact that each of these efforts has to pats the judgment of the most conservative type of mind —-the legal mind —of the last generation. And President Roose-

velt’s “revolutionary” suggestion is to appoint slightly younger judges! And Americans rather boast of being dp4o-date and practical. They may be so in technical inventions and business, but certainly not in methods of government. Just imagine the language of Mr Semipie land Co. if all the legislation of the past 12 months had had to go up before the Supreme Court of New Zealand to see if it was in line 'With what our judges thought. The system renders practically impossible the legislature application of new social and economic ideas to meet the new needs of a new situation. The Conservative mind has* a stranglehold on the law of the U.S.A, of which the nearest para Jell is the situation of Sinba.d the Sailor when the Old Man of the Sea was straddling his shoulders.