Is one section of the country imposing its will upon the entire nation?

In light of the recent SCOTUS rulings, one might ask, one might suspect, that there are regional and educational influences playing against the States, which diminish their countervailing powers that oppose federal encroachment.

Harvard-Educated

Elena Kagan,

Stephen G. Breyer,

Anthony M. Kennedy

Antonin Scalia

John G. Roberts, Jr

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Columbia Law School)

Yale-Educated

Clarence Thomas

Samuel Alito

Sonia Sotomayor

If one further reduces the count by liberalist tendencies, we have four of the five liberals Harvard-educated.  Such judicial power drawn from one "well."  Is not the country full of great law schools and legal minds?  Yes.

It is hardly an exaggeration to notice and report that the Northeast of the United States is not known for the promotion of "states' rights."  One will not find many Tenth Amendment Societies up in that corner of the country.

It is not beyond logic, then, to presume that those educated in that region are steeped in a prejudice not favoring the notion of a healthy balance between state powers and federal powers.

In conjunction with what may be regional and institutional biases, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the noted jurist, once revealed and perhaps admitted to the inner workings of the SCOTUS.   In his very first law review article, written in 1870, he said, "It is the merit of the common law that it decides the case first and determines the principle afterwards."

The argument can be made that the regional proclivities and the liberal institution education, coupled with, if Holmes was correct, the "decision, then the reasoning" order of decision arrival, make these rulings eroding state powers essentially done deals.  All else is formality.

In the book Nullification, Thomas Woods writes, "[S]ince the federal courts are themselves a branch of the federal government, how can people be expected to consider them impartial arbiters?  The Supreme Court itself, after all, although usually pointed to as the monopolistic and infallible judge of constitutionality of the federal government’s actions, is itself a branch of the federal government. So, in disputes between the states and the federal government, the resolution is to come from … the federal government?  Under that arrangement, the states would inexorably be eclipsed by the federal government."

We are in full witness of such happenings.  Regional and educationally delivered biases; a predisposition to decide, then reason; and the arrangement that the courts are merely a branch of the federal system whose power they are expected to restrain – all leads to disappointment.  It may simply be one portion of the country, with its concepts and biases, imposing its will upon the remainder of the country.  Feels like it.