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Unit 6: Socio-Economic Bases and Salient Features of the Constitutions

of amendments in it. In a situation of deadlock, the matter is sorted out by the compromise or Notes
conciliation committee having equal number of members from both the houses. On account of
being senior and seasoned politicians of the country, the members of the Senate are expected to
have their final say in this committee. So to call Senate as the upper house is to make a case of
terminological inexactitude.
6. Judicial Supremacy
Whereas the English Constitution is known for the ‘sovereignty of Parliament’ as its dominant
characteristic, judicial supremacy is said to be the outstanding feature of its American
counterpart. The powerful position of the judiciary becomes a source of astonishment when
one studies it in the context of the basic features of the American Constitution contained in the
principle of separation of powers and checks and balances. The founding fathers vested judicial
authority in the Courts as they vested legislative authority in the Congress and the executive
authority in the President without making one superior to or supreme over another. It is clear
from the language of the Constitution that the makers regarded the federal judiciary as “the
third member of government trinity, no less important than the other two members.” And yet
the courts have enhanced their authority in course of time with the result that they have come
to establish their supreme hold by virtue of this fact that they “have the right to review the
activities of all agencies of government in order to determine whether they are legally and
constitutionally valid.”
The vesting of the power in the Court of interpreting the words and phrases of the Constitution
has proved a blessing of the founding fathers to the authors of the great power of the federal
judiciary what is known by the name of ‘judicial review’. Ever since the days of Chief Justice
Marshall, the judges of the Supreme Court and subordinate federal courts have been making
use of this unique power in determining the validity of an impugned legislative or executive
measure. Not only this, the judiciary has outstretched its arms so as to cover State legislation
and administration also for this purpose. Thus, a situation has come where the federal judiciary
has converted itself into a final arbiter of determining whether a law made by the Central or
State legislatures or a decree promulgated by the executive is valid and, therefore, operative or
not. Matters have reached a stage that the American Constitution is said to be, in the words of
justice Hughes, ‘what the judge says it is’.
The power of judicial review has certainly made the Supreme Court something more than an
equal member of the government trinity. Viewed from one angle, it may be said to have
become the third and super-chamber of the American national legislature; viewed from another,
it may also be described as to have become a quasi-political body functioning not in a judicial
vacuum but whirling in a political climate. The expression of ‘due process of law’ has become
a dexterous tool in the hands of the judges to define what is due or not, and that too in the light
of the obtaining political circumstances. The way the federal judiciary has acted in invalidating
certain progressive measures has made it liable for the charge of being conservative and
deliberately hostile to the advent of a system favourable to the interest of the economically
weaker sections of the community. Thus, a critic like Laski has commented that the ‘due
process’ has meant ‘not a road but a gate and the thing it barred was an attempt to transform
political democracy in the United States into social democracy.
Creation of the Russian Federation
The political and socio-economic order established by Lenin in 1917 and consolidated by Stalin
started crumbling after 1970. The emerging wave of criticism hit at the era of Brezhnev (1969-82)
as the period of slowing down (zamedleniye) and stagnation (zastoi). It paved the way for the
inauguration of the new era of openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika) under the
leadership of Mikhail Gorbachov. He first used the word glasnost at a party conference on the
point of ideology in December 1984 when he was Second Secretary to ailing Chernenkov. After
taking charge in March, 1985 he put his ‘new thinking’ before the people in clear and strong terms.
On 21 May, 1988 he said in a party meeting; “Certainly it is impossible today to describe in detail
the concrete image of the future for which we are reaching through perestroika, but the basic

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