There exists a constitutional method to alter the outcome of a Court ruling that offends a substantial majority of our people. That is the route of the constitutional amendment, not the back-door method of denying to the Supreme Court its fundamental authority to rule on the meaning and application of the Constitution. In short, the issue at stake in this bill is highly controversial. Even if there were a broader and more general agreement, the question is not the goal of the bill. It is the means by which that goal is sought.
Court stripping is an unacceptable and lethal method.
Through a series of Supreme Court decisions, this freedom, elementary to the drafters of the Constitution, has been taken away from the States. It is time we in Congress restored this fundamental American liberty. The school prayer controversy has not arisen because of the text of the Constitution, but because of outright judicial distortions of that text. The text never prohibited voluntary prayer in the public schools, as American history and experience before the Supreme Court's first decision in 1962 so clearly attests. The text leaves the matter of school prayer, along with matters of church-state relations, exclusively up to the States.