Lawless and Proud of It
By Wow. In the race for the Alabama Supreme Court, the nominees are openly advancing the “let’s pretend Article VI doesn’t exist” theory of the Constitution you may remember from attempts to nullify Supreme Court decisions during the civil rights era:
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.
Um, actually, they should. This is not ambiguous. The Supremacy Clause doesn’t have a “unless we would have ruled differently if we were sitting on the federal courts” exception. This is not a dispute about constitutional interpretation; this is about the rule of law, and these candidates seem to oppose it.