Michele Bachmann says that she would let Congress be superior to the presidency, in line with her interpretation of the Federalist Papers, (incorrectly credited to Jefferson,) in an interview at Senator Jim DeMint’s Palmetto Freedom Forum on Labor Day Monday. Bachmann accused the Supreme Court of imposing “their own personal morality on the rest of the nation.”
Bachmann also said she would support a constitutional amendment to prohibit abortion.
The Huffington Post adds,
During a Republican presidential primary forum designed to test the candidates’ conservative bona fides, Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, said that if he were elected president, he wouldn’t enter a showdown with the Supreme Court — which ruled in 1973 that abortion is allowed under the constitution — by passing a bill through Congress to make abortion illegal. Bachmann, a Republican congresswoman from Minnesota, said she would.
“If the Supreme Court, by a plurality of the justices, may impose their own personal morality on the rest of the nation, then we are quite literally being ruled by those individuals as opposed to giving our consent to the people’s representatives,” Bachmann said.
Pressed whether she would be prepared for “a confrontation” with the court, Bachmann said: “Most assuredly.”
The panelist pressing the abortion question was Robert George, a Princeton professor and constitutional scholar who also chairs the National Organization for Marriage. Tea Party favorites Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) asked questions alongside George.
George pressed each of the five candidates who took part in the forum over whether they would utilize Section 5 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution to contravene the Supreme Court on the issue of abortion and put the judiciary in its proper place as one of the three branches of government. The 14th amendment insists that no state “shall deprive any person of life … without due process”; section five adds — critically, in the eyes of anti-abortion scholars — that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”
George called the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision “usurpative,” and compared it to the court’s “Dred Scott” decision, which ruled that black slaves in the U.S. were not protected by the Constitution and could not be citizens, that the Congress could not prohibit slavery in U.S. territories, and that slaves could not be taken away from their owners without due process for the owner.
George said the Court, in that 1857 decision, “usurped the authority of the elected representatives of the people, the Congress and the president, and purported to bind their hands indefinitely and decisively.”
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