BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – In a debate with powerful echoes of the turbulent civil rights era, four Republicans running for Alabama’s Supreme Court are making an argument legal scholars thought was settled in the 1800s: that state courts are not bound by U.S. Supreme Court precedents.
The Constitution says federal law trumps state laws, and legal experts say there is general agreement that state courts must defer to the U.S. Supreme Court on matters of federal law.
Yet Justice Tom Parker, who is running for chief justice, argues that state judges should refuse to follow U.S. Supreme Court precedents they believe to be erroneous. Three other GOP candidates in Tuesday’s primary have made nearly identical arguments.
“State supreme court judges should not follow obviously wrong decisions simply because they are ‘precedents,'” Parker wrote in a newspaper opinion piece in January that was prompted by a murder case that came before the Alabama high court.
Sadly, this is a case of following the example already set. Dubya has blatantly and repeatedly discarded law, the Constitution, Congress, and the judiciary in his activities, generally claiming he is above all of them and not bound by their actions. Why shouldn’t the rest of his party do the same?
What frightens me is the inherent anarchy, inter alia, that such actions would create. The law would become useless, unenforceable, and relegated to the history books. Their idea is that judges should have the ability to decide what they will and won’t follow from courts above them in the judicial chain of command. Essentially, if you disagree with a ruling, set it aside and pretend it’s not there, a course of action that would indeed flip jurisprudence on its ear as precedential and constitutional trusses become worthless.
Since the Constitution itself clearly dictates federal law trumps state law, this is yet more conservative intent simply to do away with that whole document.