NEW YORK (PNN) - October 23, 2011 - For countless years, U.S. federal courts have issued unconstitutional rulings, and U.S. District judges have engaged in judicial activism, issuing rulings prohibiting the free exercise of religious expression, freedom to own firearms, or various other activities protected from government intrusion by the constitutional limitations on the government.

Now a majority of Republican presidential candidates are proposing to limit the power of federal courts in what could be a winning campaign issue, especially among Tea Party-style voters.

Earlier this month, for example, Newt Gingrich declared that as president he would feel free to ignore Supreme Court rulings. He later went on to suggest that a judge who had ruled that a public high school could not include a formal prayer in its graduation ceremony should be forced to defend his decision before a congressional committee.

Most of the other candidates have hopped on the anti-judicial bandwagon as well, with Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman being the only holdouts. Rick Santorum, for example, complains that “we are tired of them feeling that these elites in society can dictate to us.”

As the New York Times reported on Sunday, “Gov. Rick Perry of Texas favors term limits for Supreme Court justices. Representatives Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Ron Paul of Texas say they would forbid the court from deciding cases concerning same-sex marriage. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, and former Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania want to abolish the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, calling it “a rogue court” that is “consistently radical”.

Paul has already gone so far as to introduce a bill, the “We the People Act”, which would restrict the jurisdiction of federal courts and make any violation “an impeachable offense”