"I've always wondered why it is that we don't do that here. It's very much in line with the 'checks and balances' concept of the government's structure."

Well, you can look at a country that does and where that leads. In Iran, their Supreme Court is called the "Council of Guardians" and they get to do a lot of pre-passage stuff, including strike the law down pre-emptively, declare that some candidates are not eligible to run, etc. and they get to do all this sua sponte. While it is a fair point that they also have their own police force, I don't think that's the only issue here. It means the judiciary is an explicitly political force accountable to the Assembly of Experts, and hence theoretically to the people, but with a voice powerful enough to shape the terms of that accountability.

I think a better solution would be to relax standing issues regarding particularity of injury where widespread Constitutional violations are alleged. For example, if it becomes illegal to criticize the President tomorrow, I would hate to think that voters registered Democrats could not challenge the law on the basis that their injury is not particularized enough. Similarly where wide-ranging searches are alleged and everyone is injured, the particularity requirement should be relaxed.

Would this tend to politicize the court? As it is, the court can at least ostensibly maintain some distance from the political lawmaking process. If it was an integral part, judges would be subject to a lot more political pressure.

As it stands, the court is the arbiter for whether a law (or section of a law) is legitimate and how it's applied. All this would do is remove the latency between legislation being written and it being 'tested'.

It probably wouldn't be practical, given that they currently don't review anywhere near 100% of legislation (but maybe that is a feature).

I would be concerned about the situation where the court effectively ends up with a veto and maybe decides that they should be the ones in charge. The only way out of that pickle is to reject the constitution.

I don't see how pressure can be applied to a position with a lifetime appointment. You could say, perhaps, that the powers that be could try to extract some pledge of allegiance before nominating/confirming a new justice, but what's to stop the justice from immediately reneging on a clearly unethical / unenforceable agreement?

Edit: I think the argument could be made that it weakens the checks and balances though. As it stands the court can overrule lawmakers, but it takes a long time generally for laws to wind up there. If they have a more immediate veto power who checks them? Not the lower courts which, to some extent, acts as a filter today.

> "I don't see how pressure can be applied to a position with a lifetime appointment."

People don't have to be forced to do things to make effectively political decisions. Being incentivized also works. And social incentive seems to work at least as well as monetary incentive.

People have families and lives and friends.

Consider that the "broccoli" argument against the PPACA's personal mandate -- an argument broadly laughed off by constitutional scholars -- was echoed verbatim by justices with mere social connections to the groups who originally espoused said laughable argument.

The U.S. Supreme Court is already just another legislature.

It recently acquired the power to levy taxes as well.

The Executive Veto power serves this purpose. Every new law may reviewed and rejected by the President. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_veto#United_States

Hey man, we had our president elected by the Supreme Court.