First, there was D A Rajapaksa

The late D. A. Rajapaksa has rightly been referred to as the 'mulmaharuka' or the seminal tree canopy, and this has to be an appropriate way to describe the patriarch of the Medamulana legacy, whose death anniversary was commemorated yesterday.

D. A. Rajapaksa was the original original thinker, if the reader would pardon the less than elegant usage, as there is nothing but an original expression that would do to describe a son of Ruhuna who evolved a Ruhunu political tradition that would eventually leave an indelible mark on the history of this country.

The late Rajapaksa crossed over from the UNP, and offered the primary bulwark from the southern flank for the crucial post-independence struggle of the nation to come into its own after years of foreign domination. But the mark he left was to endure, not only through the work he did but by a paternal legacy that gave the country what was probably her only really home-grown politician, Mahinda Rajapaksa. The rest is not just history, it's historical lore.

The U.S. election - and the impeachment

By the time a copy of this newspaper reaches your home or workplace tomorrow, the result of the 2012 U.S. Presidential race would probably have already been announced.

At the time of writing, the incumbent Barack Obama seemed to be headed for victory, with the system seeming to favour him due to the quirks of how the 'electoral college' operates. Whether Obama wins or Romney wins, will probably not make much of a difference to the rest of the world, as U.S. foreign policy is by and large not likely to change substantially in a hurry.

But, axiomatically, the fate of the world economy generally has a fair amount to do with the way the world's largest economy operates, and it is fervently hoped almost everywhere in the world that whoever will be elected the President today would be able to dig the U.S. out of the rather deep hole that country is in the form of a chronically ailing economy.

On the opposite page, we carry an extremely thoughtful and well-argued analysis on how the local punditry has displayed over reliance on the essentially Jeffersonian interpretation of separation of powers, in arguing against the impeachment motion that faces the Sri Lankan Chief Justice, Shirani Bandaranayake. Says Dr. Kamal Wickremesinghe that the American constitutional construct that defined separation of powers as some sort of a safeguard against the 'despotism' of an elected legislature, is but one model and that on the one hand, the over reliance on that doctrine of separation in fact does injustice to the people and their elected representatives.

After all, in a democracy, the judiciary is not elected. The legislature is, and so is the executive. Wickremesinghe observes that 'Alexander Hamilton in his Federalist Paper 78 laid the groundwork for the doctrine of judicial review of federal legislation or Acts of the executive by federal courts in the U.S.

Anti-Federalists contended that constitutional provisions such as Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution which provided that "The judicial power shall extend to all cases in law and equity, the laws, and treaties made, or which shall be made", without guidance on principles of interpretation, nullified the hard-fought gains of the American Revolution and promised to return America to the kind of tyranny of George III.'

Those who have taken up cudgels against the impeachment motion against the Chief Justice writing many a thesis propounding doctrinaire political theory in the local media have stressed, with the almost religious fervour of quoting scripture, the importance of separation of powers -- and some have said that the government wants to exercise control at the expense of democracy.

Wickremesinghe's article makes fairly clear that control by the people's representatives is desirable and sometimes preferred to the control of the unelected judiciary. After all this is why most democrats hope that Barack Obama would have won in the U.S. by the time this edition is read today - after all, then he would leave a useful legacy of liberal Supreme Court judges! See? The judiciary is the exercise of people's power, through the agency of the executive and the legislature - and that is so in the 'best' of places!