Summary: WHAT IF… We Required More of our Courts?
What if every federal judge applied the law and the Constitution faithfully, rather than rewriting them to match personal or political preference?
This is the summary. Read the full article with all sources here
This is the third post in our Simple Liberty series, and the last of three on the branches our Founders designed to serve us rather than rule us. Posts #1 and #2 took up the Executive and the Legislative.
The pattern was the same in both: Institutions built for the common good, now too often corrupted for personal power, profit, and ruling class advantage. Both parties have done it, over decades, on our watch.
The judiciary suffers the same failing, with one difference: Presidents and members of Congress can be voted out. Federal judges, once confirmed, serve for life. That raises a harder question: How do we keep the courts, all the way up to the Supreme Court, applying the Constitution as written rather than rewriting it from the bench?
Citizens, not politicians or pundits. Ordinary citizens who show up.
Here are seven questions for our courts:
#1 - What if character mattered most?
What if we confirmed only judges of proven good character, fully committed to applying the Constitution regardless of who appointed them?
Without character at the foundation, structural reform will not hold. The robe carries a responsibility rather than a license. Both parties have appointed judges who ruled against the president who nominated them when the law demanded it, and that is the standard we should require of all of them.
#2 - What if judges applied the law instead of making it?
Congress makes the law, the courts apply it, the president enforces it. Judges who invent rights the Constitution never granted, or ignore ones it plainly protects, have moved past interpretation into unconstitutional lawmaking from the bench. It happens on the left and on the right.
The remedy is a restored commitment to applying the Constitution as written, whatever the ideology of the judge. Courts were never meant to serve as a shortcut around the democratic process.
#3 - What if judicial appointments had reasonable age boundaries?
Judicial power needs both seasoned wisdom and full mental acuity. Lifetime tenure with no age accountability has left some judges serving while visibly diminished, with no realistic removal short of impeachment.
A sensible minimum age (around 45) and a retirement age (around 80 to 85) would help. We already set fitness standards for pilots and surgeons, and the people who interpret our Constitution should meet no less.
#4 - What if judges were held to a binding ethics code?
Until 2023 the Supreme Court had no formal ethics code at all, and the one it adopted is voluntary and self-enforced. Lower judges are policed by other judges.
A binding, outside-enforced code should bar any judge from hearing cases involving their own financial interests, their family, or the political donors tied to their appointment.
#5 - What if we removed ethical transgressions by attorneys?
The system’s integrity depends on lawyers too. Judge-shopping steers cases to a hand-picked judge for nationwide rulings; class actions too often enrich attorneys while delivering pennies to the citizens they claim to represent; and prosecutors and defense attorneys who conceal evidence rarely face consequences.
Automatic, even-handed sanctions for violating the duty of candor, applied on either side, would restore fairness.
#6 - What if Congress fulfilled its oversight role without political bias?
Confirmations have become an embarrassing spectacle. One party blocks nominees for years; the other turns hearings into ideological auditions. Both treat the judiciary as a prize to be won.
The cost falls on citizens: Sixty-plus vacancies and cases that drag three to five years before resolution.
#7 - What if we strengthened the basics of judicial accountability?
Opinions should be written in plain language the affected citizen can read.
Major rulings deserve full, transparent argument rather than emergency “shadow docket” orders decided without it. Congress can also define and limit the power of a single judge to block national policy, without eliminating the injunction entirely.
Want the evidence? Read the full article with all sources here.
The Mountain Ahead
Reforming the judiciary means changing an institution of more than 870 federal judges, appointed for life and none directly elected. This may be the steepest mountain of the three. The same truth carries it: The people hold the power, when we choose to use it.
We never vote for a single federal judge. We do, however, choose the President who nominates them and the Senators who confirm them. This is another reason every vote counts.
Too many of us are not voting, and every uncast vote hands that power to someone else.
The largest bloc in America is not the left or the right. It is the people who stayed home. In 2024, roughly 89 million eligible Americans did not vote, more than voted for either candidate. The most powerful force in the country sat on the sidelines, convinced their voice did not matter.
They were mistaken.
Consider what that silence surrenders. A single presidential term now routinely fills over 200 of those lifetime judgeships, along with seats on the Supreme Court, and those judges rule for decades. Presidential elections turn on very small numbers: About 78,000 votes across three states in 2016, and some 43,000 in 2020. The people who stay home are not sitting out one election. They are shaping the courts for a generation.
The answer is not violence or civil war. Division is exactly what the powerful want, and their excuse to seize more power and strip our freedoms. We will not hand it to them.
The answer is something older and harder: We engage, neighbor to neighbor, voter and non-voter alike, with truth, integrity, and hope. We insist, through our senators, that no one reaches the federal bench who cannot show the character and restraint our republic requires, whatever their party.
Self-governance is work, and it is ours to do.
What this asks of us is small: Some of our time and some of our attention. American citizens must now show up as responsible stewards of our own freedom.
We can do this.
That concludes our look at all three branches: The one that enforces the law, the many who make the laws, and the courts that interpret them. Each was carefully designed to check the others.
Every branch has drifted from its purpose, and every branch can be restored. Structure alone will not do it. Renewal comes when the courageous good character of active citizens prevails. Our common values and virtues are where we turn next.
Read the full article, with all sources and citations here.
P.S.
The only hope for America is to restore our covenant to common values, our federal government’s wise three-branch design, and the founding solutions we have abandoned or allowed to be corrupted. The answer is not socialism, communism, dictatorship, or monarchy.
It is a republic with true equal rights for all.
Renewal requires us to strengthen our character, protect our rights, and gratefully steward the people’s government for the common good.
Simple Liberty unites everyday Americans to research the facts behind our nation’s biggest problems and develop solutions for the common good, because politicians and billionaires will not do it for us.