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Presidents’ right to criticise court rulings

Jan 24, 2010 Letters

Dear Editor,
There are many people who naively believe that heads of State should not comment on decisions of the judiciary, citing the ‘separation of powers doctrine’ as a reason; total poppycock; heads of State do frequently make comments on the judiciary, depending on the nature of the issue. Let’s look at the latest episode in this saga of naiveté.
ABC News reported on Thursday, January 21, 2010, that the U.S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 decision, invalidated limits on corporate spending in political campaigns. The U.S. Supreme Court questioned the constitutionality of the federal McCain-Feingold limitations on corporate spending in political campaigns, and state regulations of corporate spending, inclusive of a federal law of 1947 and several relevant laws restricting spending in about 12 States.
According to ABC News, Justice Anthony Kennedy speaking for the majority wrote on the decision stated that “When Government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful.”
Along with Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor, Justice John Paul Stevens, according to ABC News, presented a dissenting opinion, saying that this decision “operates with a sledge hammer rather than a scalpel” and warned that it may “undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the nation. The court’s opinion is thus a rejection of the common sense of the American people who have recognised a need to prevent corporations from undermining self-government since the founding and who have fought against the distinctive corrupting potential of corporate electioneering since the days of Theodore Roosevelt.”
Some believe that this ruling would enable politicians, vis-à-vis the powerful corporate world to galvanize their way into Congress.
Then came President Barack Obama in Act II; ABC News reported that President Obama attacked the ruling and pledged a “forceful response” to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision that he believes provides “a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics.” This kind of response from an American President is quite normal in the U.S. and in most parts of the democratic world; and it is not an infringement of the ‘separation of powers’ doctrine.
Some may recall how the Guyana media and opposition elements became frantic when President Bharrat Jagdeo expressed concerns over the Court’s ruling on the distribution of the scrutineering funds. And the implication was explicit, too, in that President Jagdeo should not make observations on judicial matters. The new opposition (the media) and the regular opposition expressed the view that such observations constituted a violation of the notion of ‘separation of powers’; clearly, this media as the new opposition and the regular opposition seemed to constitute a misguided collective.
A democracy enables those adjudicating in the judiciary to carry the necessary and sufficient professionalism, in order to present just and fundamentally fair rulings; and Guyana is a democracy. Undoubtedly, then, under this type of political system, those adjudicating in the judiciary need not bother about comments on their rulings, regardless of the quarters from which they emerge; unless, of course, such rulings really are the ‘pits’.
And so President Obama, President Jagdeo, and other heads are quite in order to both historically and contemporaneously, express concerns about rulings from the judiciary.
Prem Misir

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