The Supreme Court - 20220703

Another week another blog post. I'm still trying to find the sweet spot in terms of length for these posts; sometimes I feel as if they're too short, but I also want to respect your time, especially considering the lack of value added because of your reading this blog. Who am I? I'll hopefully have it all figured out before too long. What to talk about this week... Well, for starters, we're growing slowly across all platforms, so that's good. We finally hit 200 subscribers on YouTube which is exciting. With that I would like to thank everyone for the support and attention you've given us, we do truly appreciate it. With that said, let's talk about The Supreme Court for a moment. 

Obviously the talk of the town at the moment is The Supreme Court. I won't go into detail on the courts decision to overturn Roe V. Wade (see last weeks post for more detail on that), I do however want to discuss the role and nature of the court, as well as some other decisions they may be revisiting in the near future (the next term). First and foremost, and probably most importantly, the court does not create law. This is severely understated in discussions on the appropriateness or lack thereof in Roe V. Wade. While I have seen it argued that judicial review and precedence make law in practice (if not officially), I disagree that this should be taken seriously as a matter of true law-making. The legislature makes law, not the judiciary, and judicial precedence should not be confused with legislation. If there was no legislation to begin with, there would be no interpretation, as was the case with Roe V. Wade in which abortion had not been legislated for or against in anyway. It was the making of a law which the Obama administration had the opportunity to codify and didn't, for whatever reason (it's probably true now that even if it were officially codified, The Supreme Court would shoot it down as the Constitution doesn't say anything about abortion and therefore is a states issue, see 10th amendment). The court now seems poised to revisit some other issues such as affirmative action and gay marriage. 

Let me state clearly that I do not believe gay marriage to be a states issue. And for this topic, lets take a gander at the 14th amendment: "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." It's this last little bit that is most important in any discussion on gay marriage; "equal protection of the laws." I'm no legal scholar, but this could or should be read as, "equal application of the laws". If the federal government is to legislate on some issue, that issue/topic must be equally applied, and all individuals for which it applies should expect equal protections under said law. This makes the issue of "gay marriage" as something distinct and separate from just marriage nonsensical. It for these reasons cannot be a State's issue. If the states decide that they are to selectively apply law, then they are in violation of the constitution, full stop. In a perfect world, the government would just be out of the institution of marriage all together, but I doubt that is going to happen anytime soon, but one can dream. With that, a quick note on affirmative action. 

I do think it a good idea for the court to revisit affirmative action. I've never really been a huge fan of affirmative action for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the government shouldn't be legislating or enacting any type of policy based on immutable characteristics like race. While I understand and sympathize with the feeling of need for affirmative action, I can't help but look at the history of the United States and the world at large, and think to myself, we haven't done all that great a job so far when it comes to making law based on race... while you may argue that affirmative action is good because it represents the opposite of anti-black racism, it still furthers racism of another type. Discrimination based on race is racism, and it doesn't matter who benefits from it, it should be taken, on principle, as a moral wrong. Anywho, I'll leave that there for the moment. No doubt we'll revisit it again at some point. Race does seem to feature heavily on this channel. I suppose I'm just tired of it all. I'm tired of the pointless distinctions, the need to call out characteristics that are mostly irrelevant. But anyway, I hope this finds you doing well. Don't forget to subscribe. Take care!

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