Friday, June 29, 2018

Long Range Consequences

There shouldn't be a lot of politics in the Supreme Court, its simply supposed to interpret the constitution and determine if it is being followed.

Clearly however it has approached that task differently over time and some of that is because of necessity.

The world of the founders was a very different place than America of today and a lot of issues are different in scope and impact.

Certainly if you consider something like the right to bear arms, its impossible to know how they would have felt about guns available today.  What was an essential item for someone on the frontier and almost everyone was on or near the frontier, is now a modern weapon with significant killing potential.  Further the need to hunt or protect against potential attacks is certainly different than it was in the 18th century.

The real problem is that over the years we have not updated the constitution often enough to keep it current.

Take the electoral college.  The need for that is doubtful and as constituted it serves to create an undemocratic outcome.

However because it has tended to allow for results like we saw in 2016, it is defended by certain interests who are more interested in power than democracy.

It is unlikely that we would have a rewrite which would require majorities that are simply not going to happen and even amending it is a slow and painful process, as intended since the founders did not want it to be subjected to mobs and whims.

So the Supreme Court has to some extent filled in the gaps that should be the job of the people of this country and we can see from the decisions and dissents that many of these issues are simply not clear.

We now see another opening which could lead to a change in many of our current positions, or it might not.

For many it is a lesson in how voting and participating in elections is so very important.

It can have consequences for a long time.

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