If judges are "overstepping boundaries" perhaps it is because the executive branch has been pushing its own boundaries out to encompass just about everything. Never before has "national security" been used to justify such executive control/interference in domestic issues - even at the expense of "state's rights".

Let's face it, the executive has been given 'carte blanche' in the past and only now is the judiciary starting to come to grips with this fact. For example, we could start with the U.S. Constitution's plain language instructions about declarations of war. The court refused to stand up and insist on it being followed, long ago, and now today a President can start a war with the flick of a finger and congress need not even be informed, let alone have it's permission asked. The courts have run away from even such fundamental issues as the constitutionality of the "War Powers Act." Thus they have helped create a huge "grey area" where the Executive treads with impunity but judges have feared to go.

I believe the real problem has been Congress and its almost complete abdication of any meaningful role in governance. Increasingly it is only an unreliable "rubber stamp" for executive branch decisions. The formula from the "Steel Seizure" cases was that when Congress and the President were in agreement, the power of the judiciary to interfere was at its minimum. Now, faced with an increasingly irrelevant Congress, the judiciary must decide if it wants to take on an increased role in ensuring that the constitution is followed.

Even more fundamentally, the United States faces the same problem faced by the Greeks as described in the Mytilene Debate (from Thucydidies "History of the Peloponessian War"). To paraphrase the great Cleon : We are not gathered here in a court of justice, but rather in a political assembly, and the question is not "What is just?" but rather how we may use the Mytilene to our favor.

We Americans, like the Greeks, love to speak of "justice" and "universal truths." But if justice and truth are universal, how can we justify setting different standards for 'us' and 'them'? And, by empowering our government to treat *anyone* in such a manner, are we not risking ourselves as well? IIRC Cleon also argued that "Democracy and Empire go ill together" -- suggesting that the matter ought not be debated at all but simply left to the generals. Likewise, can the United States survive with a President who is an 'Emperor' overseas? Or will it eventually result in empire on our shores?