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Americans and the Supreme Court
Too many Americans have forgotten how the 3 branches of government work. Maybe they never learned?
We all have opinions of what we think should be “the way”, but the idea of the Supreme Court is to ideally rise above feelings and opinion and adjudicate strictly considering “is the thing we’re looking at constitutional, rooted in, or somehow spoken of in or by the Constitution?”.
If something is, or is not, Constitutional, if you really think about it, shouldn’t every decision that comes out of the Supreme Court be 9–0?
If the 9 Justices are evaluating a case to determine if it is constitutional, then politics aside, it should be fairly straightforward to pit a case against the Constitution and make a fairly quick and easy determination.
In every Supreme Court decision there are millions of American who think the Court got it right, while millions of others who think the court got it wrong. Very often that is based on feelings and not rooted in “was the thing constitutional or not”
Four good examples of this are the recent rulings on Student Loan Forgiveness, Affirmative Action as a part of college acceptance, Religious Freedom, and Roe vs. Wade.
Whether you agree with the high court or not, look at it for a moment as it relates to the Constitution.
Student Loan Forgiveness
When Joe Biden was running for President, in an appeal to the younger voters who are sitting on a ton of student debt he made a campaign promise to forgive student debt after he’s elected President.
The issue here is this — does the President have the authority to cancel all of this student debt?
The answer according to the SCOTUS is no, the Executive branch of the government does not have the authority to cancel student debt unless Congress approves — because Congress makes the laws in our system.
Chief Justice Roberts said “The question here is not whether something should be done; it is who has the authority to do it”.
And that is the key. It’s not what you feel should be done, it’s was the move made by the President here valid constitutionally?
