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Comment by muaytimbo | Hacker News Reader

The document itself is useless unless there is a mechanism to enforce laws which encroach upon it’s central tenets. We have that, the judiciary, but on the whole they completely abdicate their responsibility to strike down affronting laws.

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The problem is that the judiciary is a timid institution by nature, because the Constitution actually says very little about it. All the courts lower than the Supreme Court are established by Congress in federal law versus the Constitution, and most of the Supreme Court's powers are implied and not explicitly defined in the Constitution, like their power to do judicial review for constitutionality. Even what is said about the Supreme Court is very vague; what it actually looks like is also at the discretion of Congress.

Given that they derive most of their power from Congress's discretion, and on top of that are not elected officials, they use their power sparingly, because it is supposed to be Congress's job to legislate.

It's worth noting that the constitution itself doesn't provide that mechanism - the judiciary created it for itself, but relies on the cooperation of the other branches for its judgments to be effective.

Agreed on that, but I think it was the very first case before the supreme court in which they declared their central role to be to decide "what the law is" or some similar statement. Even though it's not constitutionally defined, like all old, atrophying organizations, inertia basically guarantees survival.

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