Fears from the other side

[A Black Falcon]

But shoudn't they also try to balance the needs of the people as well? I'm pretty sure that allowing the goverment to take your property and give it to Wal-Mart isn't doing that.

Only to a degree. Remember, our government was created to have layers to insulate overall government policy from popular movements... the founders were suspicious of the people, even if they did end up with a very liberal constitution for the time, and it shows. All of the layers are there to keep the people from having too much direct impact on what the government does... over time some of that has eroded away (and rightly I'd say), but not all, and not all of it should go. This is probably a case of that... them making the decision from a purely legal stance (though I have no idea how they managed to convince themselves that this goes with the spirit of the constitution...), not one that is based on popular opinion. (usually not going with popular opinion is a good thing, but here if you look at it as a case of that it's not, intrestingly enough... (you know, I'd consider the standard example of 'not following sudden public pressure' would be the 'no sudden popular movement can take over government in the space of two years (and that's good)' thing)

I'm not sure they are meant to be apolitical... Having to consider the opinions of the other two parts of government with potential consequences seems to be a part of that whole check and/or balance thing. I hate to use an extreme example and I know where this analogy fails, but when a dictator finally comes to power, political considerations no longer exist except in terms of preventing rebellion or outside invasion.

They're supposed to be above partizan political concerns, for sure...