[higherpurpose]

This is why it's a shame the US doesn't have a Constitutional Court with its sole purpose of filtering out unconstitutional bills signed by the president before they become actual laws.

Then bills like the Patriot Act in its current form would have a much smaller chance of becoming laws, and then having the government abuse them for two decades before they are challenged at the Supreme Court.

[rtkwe]

A Constitutional Court seems like a good idea except the politics surrounding it would be at least as bad as those surrounding the Supreme Court and probably worse because it'd have an earlier and thus more powerful interdiction chance against laws.

It usually isn't that much of an issue because normally unconstitutional laws are quickly brought up through the courts and along the way injunctions are issued preventing the problematic portions of the law from being exercised. It's an issue with the latest spying and PATRIOT ACT laws (along with all it's spawn) is the fact that because of the secrecy it's fairly impossible to prove standing for the challenge to begin in the first place.

[twoodfin]

If such an institution existed, it would have so much more power than the Supreme Court that it would inevitably be politicized in a far more insidious manner than the Court is today.

The right way to keep unconstitutional bills from becoming law is to vote for representatives who won't vote for them and presidents who won't sign them. Hoping a handful of septuagenarians in robes will "do the right thing" is fundamentally an anti-small-d-democratic and anti-small-r-republican notion.