Former Justice David Souter is urging that Americans improve their civic education. He cites the fact that 2/3 of citizens don’t know that there are three branches of the federal government. (State and local government is probably similarly not understood). Without knowing the basic composition of government, it’s no wonder they are so easily stoked into a rage about what this or that judge is doing. If they don’t understand that there is a judiciary or its relationship to the executive and legislative branches, they have no real metric for determining whether the judge is acting within his or her proper authority.
A person without the proper grounding of a civic education is more susceptible to incitement by whatever the passion of the hour might be. They are more receptive to the demagoguery of the likes of John Cornyn who asserted that “judicial activism” (a term which inevitably boils down to not much more or less than disagreeing with whoever is using the term) was the root cause of the slaying of a federal judge in Georgia. Or Tom DeLay ominously saying that judges would have to “answer for their behavior” when they refused to intervene in the Terri Schiavo matter after a bill was rammed through Congress purporting to give the courts new jurisdiction over her particular case. And the efforts to delegitimize and/or intimidate the judiciary in recent years has gone on and on and on.
“There is a danger to judicial independence when people have no understanding of how the judiciary fits into the constitutional scheme,” Souter said in his keynote address to the American Bar Association’s annual meeting.
. . .
Souter said a rebirth of civic education that teaches the lessons he learned at those New England town meetings is needed to ensure the nation has “judges who stand up for individual rights against the popular will.”
And, it’s typically the enforcement of the rights of the few against the passions of the many that really honk off the types of folks who would engage in the intimidation tactics against the judiciary. Americans have to get beyond the bumper sticker knowledge of government limited to “majority rules” to understand that this isn’t always the case and why it is absolutely appropriate that individuals should have rights that are not subject to the whims of the majority.
I could not agree more. This is truly THE issue at the bottom of all others. My undergraduate students (juniors and seniors in college) have only the dimmest notion of our constitutional architecture, or the Enlightenment philosophy that animated the nation’s founders. They don’t know that the Bill of Rights only restrains government. The list of things they don’t know is long, and they probably know MORE than the majority of Americans.
In my last two books, I have argued that if we do not massively improve civic education, we simply will not be able to solve the other problems we face. You can’t correct malfunctioning systems if you are unaware that they ARE malfunctioning!
Sorry for the length of this comment, but you hit my “hot button.”
Not a long comment, and very well said.