The most powerful man in America

No, it's not George W. Bush. Or Dick Cheney. It's not even Rush Limbaugh.

Attorney Vincent G. Gioia, writing at The New Media Journal.us, makes a persuasive case that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy now has the power of life or death over many Americans.

Kennedy is the swing vote on the nine-member Supreme Court, which has four solid conservatives and four committed liberals. Kennedy, as we witnessed in recent weeks, is the deciding vote in cases involving gun control, the death penalty and abortion.

In his column, "Is American Law Now Determined by One Man?" Gioia argues that the Supreme Court has usurped too much power in our system of government.

Gioia writes:

Recent history is replete with judicial action overturning the will of a majority of voters and citizens in our country. When the judiciary has the power to impose their social views on the public regarding how people should act and think, then the Constitutional prescription of three equal branches of government is meaningless. The most tragic part of the story is that the brave men who created the United States of America gave everything to design a brilliant unique government with checks and balances so that no one branch could dominate the others and the country. Yet now we have judges around the country that put themselves above the law by making law on their terms. Sadly the U.S. Supreme Court, the final arbiter of what does and does not conform to the Constitution, is a part of this coup d'e tat. Justices who don't respect the Constitution as worded are determined to change our government by fiat and it only takes five of them to do that.

Food for thought as Americans prepare to elect a new president, who will most likely nominate at least three new justices to the Supreme Court. It's clear Barack Obama would stack the court with more liberal activists who would use the court to impose their social agenda on the rest of us. John McCain has pledged to nominate justices who've actually read the Constitution.

Read the full column by Gioia at The New Media Journal.us