High School Reading Grades 11 12 Quiz
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READING INFORMATIONAL TEXT
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The following is adapted from an original essay written in the style of The Federalist Papers, arguing for a proposed constitutional provision.
To the People of this Commonwealth:
Among the objections urged against the proposed judiciary, none has been pressed with greater vehemence than that which supposes the power of the courts to expound the laws will, in time, engulf the legislative authority itself. The apprehension, though not without a superficial plausibility, dissolves upon closer inspection. For the judiciary, having neither the sword of the executive nor the purse of the legislature, must depend for the efficacy of its judgments upon the very branches it is accused of threatening to subdue. What weapon has a judge, save reasoned argument set upon parchment? And what force has parchment, when unaccompanied by the concurrence of those who command the militia and the treasury?
It is objected, further, that judges holding office during good behavior will grow imperious, being beyond the reach of popular disapprobation. But let it be observed that the very insulation complained of is the guarantor of that impartiality without which the rights of the minority must ever be at the mercy of transient majorities. A judge who trembles before the next election is no judge at all, but a mere agent of the prevailing faction. Independence is not a privilege granted to the bench for its own aggrandizement; it is a bulwark erected for the protection of the humblest citizen against the encroachments of power, however popularly clothed.
Some have proposed, as a remedy, that judicial decisions be subject to reversal by a supermajority of the legislature. Such an expedient, however moderate in appearance, would in effect restore to the political branches the very authority the Constitution seeks to withhold. For a right that may be extinguished by seventy or eighty voices in an assembly is not a right, but a sufferance; and a Constitution that permits such reversal has ceased, in any meaningful sense, to be fundamental law.
— PUBLIUS
In the third paragraph, the distinction the author draws between a right and a sufferance functions primarily to
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