Politicized Courts

Re “The Great Judicial Stall,” Opinion, Sept. 5: David M. O’Brien states that the courts have been turned into an arena of ideological combat. Actually, it is the courts that have thrust themselves into the arena of political combat. They have done this by the self-expansion of their powers from Alexander Hamilton’s time, when litigation issues were over who owned the cow, to today, when a single person in black routinely overturns the democratic process and thwarts the will of millions of voters or when a court reinvents the Constitution to mean whatever it thinks it should have said.

Politics is about power and when the courts have taken (some would say usurped) so much power, they are and will remain, inappropriately, in the political arena.

GORDON L. PETERSON

San Clemente