This AP story and several others I’ve seen indicate that the news media are trying to spice up the Roberts hearing. Check out this lede:
Chief Justice nominee John Roberts said Wednesday that Congress has the right to counter Supreme Court rulings including a divisive decision giving cities broad power to seize and raze people’s homes for private development.
This makes it sound like John Roberts is repudiating the notion of judicial review — which would indeed be highly controversial. In fact, Roberts just stated as a matter of fact that in the Kelo case, Congress or any of the state legislature could make laws preventing the kinds of property seizures at issue in that case.
That’s not controversial, it’s just true. But the way the media is spicing this up, you’d think Roberts had said that if the Supreme Court rules something unconstitutional, Congress can just override it.
Please — legal issues are hard enough to understand without the media muddying the waters in an attempt to stir up controversy.
UPDATE: See Matthew Yglesias from last July for a better explanation of what Roberts was talking about:
The standard reason for congressmen to get outraged at the courts is that Congress passed a law the courts strike down. What happened [in the Kelo decision] was that the courts refused to strike down government actions. If we’re going to have things like House members voting “365 to 33 late Thursday night in support of a resolution expressing ‘grave disapproval’ at the court decision,” then they should just pass some laws restricting the use of eminent domain. They’re the U.S. Congress, after all; they don’t need to wait for the courts to bail them out. [emphasis added]