Trego's Mountain Ear

During most of my lifetime, the Supreme Court has disagreed with me.  I’m not quite a single issue guy, but I have often wondered just what part of ‘shall not be infringed’ is so hard to understand.  Lately, I’ve been looking at a collection of legal minds that can understand ‘shall not be infringed.’

When I was young, there were billboards reading “Impeach Earl Warren.”  Warren was a Republican – elected governor of California 3 times running – and when he ran for California Attorney General, he was both the Republican and the Democrat candidate.  He won, too.  As the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, he managed to keep the civil rights decisions (notably Brown v Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia) unanimous, 9-0 decisions.  I kind of liked Earl Warren, but not everyone did.  Now I see Occasio-Cortez wanting to impeach Supreme Court justices.  The John Birch folks were the ones who wanted to impeach Earl Warren.

There seems to be a majority who would term the Birchers “right wing wackos.’  Likewise, there are few in my neighborhood who would argue against AOC’s status as a “left wing wacko.”  The problem is the left and the right have moved further from the center.  Perhaps we need to simplify the terminology and just admit a wacko is a wacko.  The extreme right and extreme left have more in common with each other than either has with moderate, middle-of-the road folks.  Perhaps we need to recognize that more frequently.

I think we need the Supreme Court decisions – even if they don’t always go the way I prefer.  Lately, they’ve been going as I prefer – it is nice to have a majority that read the second amendment similarly to the way I read it.  The problem is that narrow decisions – the 5 to 4 sort – have a much better chance of being reversed years down the line than the 9 to 0 decisions.

I took an undergrad course in constitutional law – and the best I can say is that it taught me to read the opinions.  It surely didn’t make me an expert.  But socially, we need an institution that makes that call – and that’s the Supreme Court’s call.  I may not always agree, but we need a place where the buck stops.

I pretty much support the Warren court’s decisions on civil rights – and admire the fact that they were mostly 9-0.  AOC wants to impeach justices on a 6 – 3 call.  Seems to me that if the decisions go along with what I want 80% of the time, they’re doing pretty well by me.  Heck, even Ruth Bader Ginsberg didn’t like the reasoning in Roe v Wade.