Duties of the Supreme Court, Senate and Electorate
Our nation relies on a functional Supreme Court to uphold the laws of our nation and to hold the legislative and executive branches of our government in check. The Supreme Court holds great sway in the lives of Americans, as it is intended to provide justice and clarity in legal dilemmas. We need the Supreme Court in order for our nation to function. Although the current eight member Supreme Court has done its best to make the best of the Republican party’s incompetence and have managed to avoid the consequences of having an uneven number of justices, they can’t keep pushing away tied cases forever. This was shown in the Supreme Court’s recent avoidance of ruling on Zubrik v. Burwell, in which the Supreme Court pushed the case back down to lower federal courts rather than doing their jobs and providing legal guidance. It’s certainly not the Supreme Court’s fault that they are unable to do what is required of them. The fault is with the Republicans, and if GOP senators don’t become competent and fulfill the requirements of their positions soon, our nation will fall into a state of legal limbo.
The fault in our written laws is that words are up to interpretation and do not always cover all the nuances of human existence. We can do our best to divine the intended meaning of a law based off of context and do our best to see how the supposed intention of a law could be applied to daily life on a case by case basis, but the solutions that could be brought up in these situations will naturally differ from person to person. This is why we need the Supreme Court. Cases that make it to the Supreme Court are not those in which the question asked is whether a law was broken. Rather, the Supreme Court determines the meaning of the law itself and clarifies how laws interact with one another, human morality and civil society by ruling on the applications of said laws in various individual cases. Without a ninth member and with an evenly divided group of justices, the Supreme Court is unable to fulfill it’s duties. Its duty doesn’t disappear however. Rather, important and decisive cases are being put at a standstill at the detriment of the American people.
This is entirely because the Republican party has decided that stubborn bullishness is of more value than both the needs of the American people and the duties that they have sworn to fulfill. It is the responsibility of the legislature to appoint a replacement to the Supreme Court in a timely manner. The Republican majority has decided that the demands of our nuanced legal system are not pressing enough and have instead decided to throw legal questions into limbo in a stupid display of stubbornness. These lawmakers are making idiotic decisions at the detriment of the American people, who are entitled to answers to these great legal questions, all due to petty partisan politics. They are picking a fight simply to fight despite the enormous repercussions of their ludicrousness on the functioning of the Supreme Court. This is ridiculous, stupid and pathetic. Grown people should know better than to jeopardize others simply to make a point.
The American electorate has the power to stop such silly pettiness. These people are only in a position to make such awful decisions because we put them there. Thus, we also have the power to remove them by not reelecting them. As American people we have an obligation to take a stand in upcoming senate elections, by voting against incompetent people. Just as the Supreme Court and Senate have an obligation to fulfill their respective duties, we as voters have a duty to ensure the election of people who will do our country good. Although the vast majority of Exonians cannot vote, we still have a voice and an ability to make an impact, and we ought to exercise both powers to ensure the smooth operation of our government.