Independence of the Judiciary

Listening to the radio tonight, I heard an interesting - and by "interesting" I mean "really dumb" - argument about the Terry Schiavo case. It was the Tammy Bruce show, but it was a guest host, and I didn't catch the name. The mystery speaker made the following claim:

It's bad that Congress tried to influence the Schiavo decision, because our system is tripartite, with independent legislative, executive and judicial branches. The judges are supposed to interpret the law, and Congress improperly tried to tell a judge how to do his job, so blah blah blah.

I never heard him try to justify his "independence" argument, however. It was more assertion than argument, really. If, as he correctly stated, the function of the judiciary is to interpret the law, pray tell what is the source of that law? The legislature, of course, and that answer right away should tell us something about how independent the judiciary really is. When a court is interpreting a statute (as opposed to deciding whether a statute is constitutional), the court is bound by what the legislature says. It has no ability to simply ignore or discard that law, simply because it doesn't like the outcome. And if the legislature reads the court's opinion and decides the court screwed up, the legislature is free to re-write the statute to get the intended result. This sort of thing happens all the time, and is never commented on at any length, because that is the way things have been working for more than 200 years now.

In that sense, then, it is patently false to claim that the judiciary is independent of the other two branches. And if the branches really were independent, then the President would be free to decline to enforce acts of Congress, and the judiciary would have no business whatsoever in deciding the constitutionality of a statute. Congress, in fact, is given express power over judicial power in our Constitution, in plain language. In order to get federal jurisdiction over any case, you need to find a source of that jurisdiction in the United States Code (generally 28 U.S.C. 1331 or 1332), a book of statutes passed by Congress. And if the substance of Terri's Bill was nothing more than Congress altering jurisdictional rules, then there was nothing at all out of the ordinary or improper in Congress' action.

The host, incidentally, then went on to ask, wouldn't Jesus want the Catholic Church to pass out condoms in Africa, and answered that of course he would.

Um, if you're going to try the "What would Jesus do" approach to political persuasion, keep in mind that your audience is composed of people who a) believe the Bible, b) want some sort of Biblical foundation for the "What would Jesus do" argument, and c) know that Jesus never condoned sin or soft-pedalled his rigid "don't break my commandments" stance. It was a little surreal to hear this guy saying the next Pope should allow married priests, women priests, and condoms, all with the "What would Jesus do" argument, all without even a passing reference to anything Jesus said.

In conclusion, I was unimpressed with Tammy's guest.