Wednesday, October 28, 2020

If your world view is threatened...


...by a Supreme Court justice reading the Constitution as it is written, then you have not done government right. Here's why.

Let's say you want to make abortion legal everywhere. How do you do that? You get the senate and the house to vote on a bill, get it passed, get the president to sign it, and it becomes law. Likely that law will be challenged, and it will go to the supreme court. Let's say the court decides there is nothing in the Constitution to allow you to write such a law (hint, there isn't).

No problem, you simply write an amendment to the Constitution, get it passed by two thirds of the house and senate, and get three fourths of the states to ratify it. It then becomes the law of the land, and no amount of SCOTUS finagling should be able to knock it down. When the Republicans freed the slaves, gave them the right to vote, gave women the right to vote, etc. that's how they did it. And so you can't really have a Supreme Court justice decide to deny women the right to vote (for instance).

The Democratic party, and sadly, a lot of Americans, think that the role of the Supreme Court justices is to "vote" for what they want. Conservative justices will always vote for conservative things and liberal justices will vote for liberal things. We need to have a balance, or a majority of people who will "vote" the right way. But that's not what the Supreme Court is supposed to be about. They are supposed to see if the laws being enacted correspond to what's written in the Constitution.

Will that stop some liberal policies from being enacted? Yes. It will also stop some conservative policies from being enacted. That's life. You either live within the rule of law, or there is no law, only raw power to oppress your opponents. Don't like the Constitution? As noted, there is an amendment process. If you can't get the amendment you want passed, it's because the American people actually don't want what you want, and you have no legal or moral authority to do what you want.

If Democrats wanted abortion to be legal everywhere, they have had forty seven years to pass a law, and potentially an amendment. Instead, they relied entirely on perverting the judicial branch, and now they are crying because they are in the minority. And their solution is still not to go the legal route (pass laws and/or an amendment) but threaten to impeach existing justices they don't like, or pack the court with ones they do. Pathetic.

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