During an appearance on The Steve Deace Show, Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) maintained that “our democracy and our representative form of government” will be “in dire straits” if the Supreme Court legalizes same-sex marriage. He told Deace that he is not “aware of any” precedent of the court making such a sweeping decision that would represent “a huge invasion into states’ rights.”
Deace: We’re talking about a supermajority of US states have already, all of them within the last ten to fifteen years, have defined what marriage is within their borders and now we have the US Supreme Court determining whether it has the jurisdiction to override a supermajority of US state laws. Mark, do you know of any precedent for that ever in American history? I can’t come up with one, ever.
Meadows: No, I’m not aware of any and obviously if it gets down to nine people deciding the will of the people our democracy and our representative form of government is in dire straits. The people here in North Carolina overwhelmingly came out and voted really en masse and with such energy that I’ve not experienced in over twenty-eight years of following politics here in North Carolina have not seen that kind of energy, and here we got the Supreme Court looking to overturn a California law that really where the voters voted there as well and you know it was obviously overturned in the Ninth Circuit and now we’ve got the Supreme Court saying that they’re going to weigh in on this particular issue. It’s a huge invasion into states’ rights and the state definition of marriage, whether you call it traditional or natural marriage, I call it marriage, you know it’s between one man and one woman, period.
Later, the freshman congressman charged that any such ruling would lead to “a constitutional crisis,” although he didn’t answer Deace’s question about how Congress would respond to the court’s decision.
Deace: What happens, I mean you’re a congressman, if the court does that, you are in a state that has already asserted its will on this issue but you’re in the body that our founders constitutionally gave oversight of the judicial branch, so you’re right in the thick of this debate. What happens if the court decides that they are their own constitutional convention without any recourse at all, what happens?
Meadows: Well I mean obviously we start to have a constitutional crisis. We’ve already seen some of that with the executive branch saying that they’re not going to enforce certain laws. I think it was Justice Scalia that brought this out in the last couple of days is when you get an executive branch that starts to decide what’s constitutional and what’s not and what they’re going to enforce and what they’re not, they’re usurping the authority of Congress and that’s the representative form of government and we can’t stand for that, as a people we can’t stand for that so we need to stand up and make sure that our voice is heard.
