Human rights protesters outside the Supreme Court. Photo by Ted Eytan, used under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 4.0
Do you remember your civics class? The one you took in high school, where you learned about each of the separate, coequal branches of the federal government? You may recall hearing a few refrains that define the premise of that course’s curriculum: “we are a democracy,” “your vote counts,” and “the courts don’t make laws, they interpret laws.”
You likely heard about the checks and balances baked into our system. A structure of shared responsibilities which ensures that the president, Congress and the courts divvy up power, rather than having a centralized, all-powerful decision-making core. Congress writes a law and passes it, a president signs it, and that law is interpreted by the courts in the cases that come before them. That’s the system we learned about.
Despite your teacher’s well-intentioned lessons, those sentiments are largely untrue; that system is fiction. Look no further than the courts in the United States. That’s where the checks begin to bounce and the scales fall far out of balance.
The Supreme Court, particularly in the present day, inserts itself into almost everything. Any statute, no matter how old, regardless of how sewn into the fabric of society, is within the crosshairs of the nine justices who comprise the court. Laws passed today, or those passed so long ago that we regard them as fixtures, are all potential targets for the justices’ revisionary aims.
You may recall the Dobbs decision of 2022. The Supreme Court, without any regard for the human cost of such a reversal, eviscerated the right of an individual to terminate a pregnancy. Because of a few unelected right-wing zealots wearing capes and pounding wooden mallets, in more American states than not, access to this reproductive health care is not a legal right.
The real-life consequences of their choice? Rape victims forced to carry a birth to term, reliving their attack—in every waking moment preceding, during, and after birth. Those who receive the devastating news that a planned pregnancy cannot safely be carried to term due to the health constraints of the parent? They are now forced to gamble their life to satiate the twisted demands of a handful of fundamentalists who decided, without the public’s say, that anyone capable of giving birth better not need to terminate a pregnancy.
How about those aspiring dictators on the bench? The ones we allow to take bribes, engage in quid-pro-quo corrupt exchanges, and have little to no accountability. They are absolutely unchecked. Despite those teachings in school, the Supreme Court is a rogue, ungovernable, and in many ways illegitimate institution.
You may wonder what about this arrangement specifically debunks our teachers’ old adages about government. How about democracy—our right to vote, and the right of our country to respect the future those votes determine for our society?
I vividly remember being told that our votes count for something in America; that every single one of us belong in a process of electing leaders and making decisions. In any democratic system, the legitimacy of a government is only as strong as its representation of the public. There are several ways in which the US does not live up to that basic tenant, but the courts are among the most obvious examples.
Take what recently transpired in Virginia. President Trump’s approval ratings have tanked, as the political reality of his gestapo ICE forces, blood lust-fueled war in Iran, and a general ignorance of the worsening affordability crisis facing millions of Americans metastasizes into a political nightmare for Republicans. Rather than face the music, Trump has concocted a shameless vote-rigging operation—scribbling Republican maps into place mere months before an election.
Without the approval of their residents, Republican states are picking their voters before the voters have a chance to pick other candidates.
Virginia voters saw this scheme, and they acted. A ballot question was placed on the ballot, and the public had an opportunity to vote directly on it. The question? Whether Virginia would amend their maps, provide a Democratic advantage ahead of the upcoming elections, and ensure the Trump plan to rig an outcome before votes are cast fails. A campaign was mounted, the voters had their say, and the people of Virginia decided to redraw those maps and foil the Republican plot.
Then, the unthinkable happened.
In a country where we are told that our votes determine our future, the real decision-makers inserted themselves. The Virginia Supreme Court, after the election campaign was over and the results confirming the remapping project were announced, simply said no. You read that right: the courts canceled the outcome of that election.
If unelected lawyers in costumes can throw away your vote, we are not a democracy
Naturally, you may ask what do we do. How do we ensure that our votes count, and that Ivy League lawyers with small hammers cannot govern us by dictate?
Jurisdiction stripping.
The powers of the court are vested in the legislature, the lawmaking branch of government. Court jurisdiction is granted by congress. By narrowing the scope of the court’s purview, we could finally create the democratic country we learned about in school, and save ourselves from rule by unelected dictate.
The legislators we elect would write the laws we want them to, the executive we all vote for would implement them, and the courts would do what most of us falsely believe they do now: interpret those laws on a case-by-case basis, and apply what we all asked for fairly. No longer could the Supremes dip their hands into the grab-bag of our remaining freedoms and rewrite them as they, and only they, see fit.
Our lawyers in robes must only be allowed to apply interpretations of the law in individual cases; they can never be allowed to opine on the quality of a law and rewrite it without our say—or worse yet, stomp on the will of people when they disagree with a choice voters make.
Let’s make the lessons of our old civic classes a reality. We must reign in the out-of-control courts, empower the public’s right to vote, and finally live up to the standard of democracy which most of us want to see realized in the United States.
Grant Chassy is a staffer in the Illinois state legislature, political advisor, and columnist. He earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from Illinois State University.