Court steals legislative power in Pa.

“A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”

Those words by James Madison framed his view that each branch of government must be held in check by the power of the other two branches. Thus was the concept of three co-equal branches of government enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of the several states.

Any pretense that the historic dynamic of checks and balances remains in Pennsylvania has now vanished. An activist state Supreme Court has repeatedly usurped the duties of the legislative branch and enabled the executive branch to exercise unfettered power.

The high court’s latest foray into judicial activism could have national implications, and in a worst-case scenario, could plunge the country into an electoral crisis if the outcome of the Presidential election hinges on this state’s electoral votes.

This is because the court has effectively re-written the law governing the counting of mail-in ballots. The Legislature passed — and the governor signed — a law requiring mail-in ballots to be received by the time the polls close on Election Day. Trampling on constitutionally-passed legislation the Supreme Court has decided to extend the counting of ballots to include those received up to three days after Election Day.

Further, the court has decreed that such ballots must be counted even if they lack a postmark or the postmark is illegible.

This means ballots mailed in after Election Day must also be counted. Further opening the door to fraud, the court also makes legal the placement of collection boxes in which ballots can be deposited — boxes with no security to ensure the legitimacy of the ballots placed therein.

The state has never experienced an election with a high number of mail-in ballots which, by their very nature have no chain-of-custody overseen by election officials. Any effort to allow counties to begin at least opening those ballots prior to Election Day to speed up the counting process vanished when the Supreme Court’s ruling poisoned the well for any legislative remedy. It was weeks after the June primary before the results of all races were known. It now appears the state is headed for a high profile re-run of that scenario.

And, complicating matters further, most voters will be voting on new machines required by Gov. Tom Wolf who demanded all systems have a paper backup. Various counties have experienced problems with these new systems and more snafus are likely in November.

As a result of all of this, it will be at least days if not weeks before we know the outcome of the Presidential race in Pennsylvania. And a disputed outcome has the potential to place Penn’s Woods in the same harsh national spotlight that shone upon Florida in the weeks after the 2000 presidential election.

All of this is just the latest example of a Supreme Court gone rogue. Several months ago the court subverted the legislative process by ruling that Gov. Wolf could veto a bill designed to end his declaration of emergency over the COVID-19 pandemic that he has used to enact policies that have decimated the state’s economy.

The Supreme Court has been eviscerating the Legislature ever since 2015 when an alliance of labor unions and Left-leading groups essentially purchased control of the court by pouring millions of dollars into electing three Democratic justices who have since ruled Pennsylvania by judicial decree.

Shortly after they took the bench in 2016, the justices stole the power of the Legislature to draw congressional district lines. The ruling judicial junta then declared the legally-enacted districts unconstitutional and put into place a new set of districts whose lines had been drawn by a California-based academic. No part of that process followed either legislative or constitutional guidelines.

And so the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has effectively rendered the General Assembly powerless. That is except for one power the Legislature can and should effectively exercise — the power to impeach Supreme Court justices. It is true impeachment should be used sparingly, but when one branch of government so blatantly oversteps its constitutional authority — and that branch is the one sworn to protect the constitution — it leaves the Legislature no choice but to impeach the offending justices.