"dhall987" wrote in message
...

If you have a better idea than a division of powers between the executive,
the legislature and the judiciary, by all means describe it for us.

My point was that people seem to accept (and even celebrate) that the
Supreme Court does not "interprete" or even "apply" the Constitution.

But it clearly does exactly that, and has for a long time.

The poster that I replied to seemed to like the idea that the
Constitution says whatever the Court says it does.

It isn't a question of liking it, but of recognizing that is what
happens--in the end the court makes the call, there is no appeal to a league
commissioner after the game. So if Washington DC passes a law saying you
can't own a handgun there, and you think that is unconstitutional, who else
do you appeal to? Some folks say the 2nd Amendment protects an individual
right, others say it's a collective right only in the context of service in
a militia, in the end we need someone to make a call, and the court has now
done that--it's an individual right, subject to regulation.

Other celebrate the
concept of the Constitution as a "living document", which simply
meqans that the Court can change its meaning on a whim.

Not really, the court doesn't exist in a vacuum, it responds to shifts in
what American society broadly believes and will accept. Individual justices
and groups of justices bring their own beliefs to bear of course, but it
isn't like the court is going to announce it has changed its mind and the
19th Amendment wasn't enacted properly and thus women no longer have the
vote.

The document
clearly describes 2 methods by which we as a federal union can rwach a
"new concensus" and neither of those is by simply a majority vote of 9
old people.

Constitutional amendments are impractical for deciding the volume of
questions we ask of the courts. We're not living in an 18th century largely
agrarian society with a population of five million. These issues are going
to come up, they do in every society which practices the rule of law, none
of them has been able to do away with the courts, and so long as there are
both courts and a constitution then the former is going to be called on to
interpret the latter.