Vote on funding betrays founders' vision.

A congressman has a remedy for Americans who are sick and tired of federal judges who declare this, that and the other thing unconstitutional.

De-fund the decisions, says John Hoestettler a Republican from Indiana. He wants Congress to cut off whatever federal dollars would be needed to enforce decisions he finds abhorrent.

"We do not have to put our faith in the faint possibility that some day five people in black robes will wake up," he told his colleagues, referring to the number of justices needed for a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Who needs a Supreme Court when we have Congress? Don't like that a federal appeals court said that the "under God" phrase in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the Constitution? Help may be on the way. Think federal judges were wrong to say that a Ten Commandments monument should be removed from Alabama's state judicial building? Hoestettler's your man.

Under his leadership, the House voted the other week to withhold federal money to carry out decisions issued by federal appeals courts in San Francisco on the pledge and in Atlanta about the monument.

Radical idea

If the U.S. Supreme Court affirms either of those unpopular decisions, "I will exercise the power of the purse again and de-fund the enforcement of that inane decision," Hoestettler pledged.

De-funding is a radical idea, indeed--and a dangerous one. Like currency, the American legal system would be worthless without a shared belief in its power. We believe that what a court says goes, and so it does. Even those who engage in civil disobedience acknowledge the power of the court to punish them.

But Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore, who erected the Ten Commandments monument, says his oath of office requires him to uphold the Constitution and therefore forbids him from obeying any court order he thinks is unconstitutional. Now the House says Congress can decide which court orders are to be followed. These attitudes are preludes to anarchy.

Hoestettler, a mechanical engineer who has been studying the law for years, said "the courts have never been given any mechanism by which they can execute their own decisions."

The House bought the idea. Of its 435-members, 260 voted to deny money for removing the Ten Commandments from the state judicial building in Montgomery. In the unlikely event that these measures pass the Senate, it's hard to predict their effect.

The larger question is whether Congress should pick and choose which court opinions should be followed.

"The framers of the Constitution never intended for the fickle sentiments of as few as five people in black robes, unelected and unaccountable to the people, to have the power to make such fundamental decisions for society," Hoestettler said.

And yet, the framers of the Constitution are the very people who made the federal judiciary essentially unaccountable. It's the only branch of government whose members are not elected, who get to keep their jobs until they die, barring conduct outrageous enough for impeachment. If the framers wanted judges to follow every shift of popular opinion, they had an odd way of showing it.

Establishing the Jaw

It's to the judicial branch of government that the framers gave the authority to decide all cases arising under the Constitution, federal laws and treaties. "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," Chief Justice John Marshall wrote 200 years ago in Marbury v. Madison.

Hoestettler stands in a long line of elected officials who have chafed under the power of the federal courts. "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it," President Andrew Jackson is said to have remarked in 1832, after the high court ruled that state law held no sway in Cherokee territory.

And yet, when thousands of Cherokees were evicted from Georgia and moved westward, it was only after the Cherokees agreed to it in a treaty, albeit a discredited one.

In the 1950s and 1960s, segregationist governors and lawmakers insisted they did not have to abide by federal court orders to integrate; deploying state laws, public declarations, a stand in the schoolhouse door and state militia. Nothing worked.

"For those in authority thus to defy the law of the land is profoundly subversive not only of our constitutional system but of the presuppositions of a democratic society," Justice Felix Frankfurter wrote in 1958 in a case stemming from the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock, Ark.

While Hoestettler's argument seems to be barred by two centuries of court decisions, it's not specifically forbidden by the Constitution. That's hardly a fine point of law. Nonetheless, "It will totally undermine the authority of the court," says Susan Low Bloch, constitutional law professor at Georgetown University.

You may hate the Ten Commandments decision. But if Congress can nullify it, why couldn't it nullify decisions you cherish?

You may think the Supreme Court was dead wrong in 2000 when it essentially declared George W. Bush president. Still, imagine the chaos if Al Gore had tried to move into the Oval Office, anyway, or if Congress had cut off funding for a Bush inauguration.

"The rule of law implies that you obey the law, even if you disagree with it," says Joel Grossman, who teaches constitutional law at Johns Hopkins University. Some things are more Important than having your way.

Ann Woolner is a columnist with Bloomberg News.